Thoughts on T206 Hoarding/Creating scarcities

[barrysloate]

Hi Michael- I would venture to say nearly all T206 players are represented in the thousands. Maybe not the toughies, like Demmitt and O'Hara, but I would think nearly all of them still survive in great numbers.

[Cardboard Junkie]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

Hi Michael- I would venture to say nearly all T206 players are represented in the thousands. Maybe not the toughies, like Demmitt and O'Hara, but I would think nearly all of them still survive in great numbers.

+1 Tens of thousands

[Pete Pyro]

I thought I remembered the number produced being around 370 million total and slightly less than 2 million still in circulation.

[MVSNYC]

Originally Posted by Pete Pyro

I thought I remembered the number produced being around 370 million total and slightly less than 2 million still in circulation.

I think Scot Reader wrote something along those numbers in his book. i thought it was around 1 million that survived, so if you do the math, it's less than 2,000 per player, and in many cases, i believe, much less.

Ted, Brian W, Jim/Tim, Wonka...jump in here. i may be wrong.

[Cardboard Junkie]

I think I heard K. O. has/had 2? Not sure and Red Wimmer wrote an article about a guy in Detroit that had 2 Wagz. Article was in SCD in the late 80's/ early 90's? I may be misremembering.

[GasHouseGang]

I wouldn't think one person could drive up the prices by purchasing all of the cards he could find of one player. However, I remember an article being written about Reggie Jackson going to a bunch of baseball card shows and purchasing all of his 1969 Topps rookie cards he could find. I don't know if it was his goal, but at least temporarily the price went up on that particular card.

[hshrimps]

What about people who are "hoarding" all those miscuts, ghosts, etc to create a price peak on those "used to be junk" cards? That's the same thing IMO.

[barrysloate]

Pure guesstimate, but I would say closer to two million survived, with the more common ones represented by over five thousand examples each. It would be interesting to have other long time collectors post their estimates too. I bet if enough people responded, and we averaged their answers, we could be reasonably close to how many are out there. Unscientific, of course, but maybe more accurate than we might think.

Anyone else?

[sago]

IIRC, Don Lepore (dealer from NJ) had 3 Wagners in the late 70's.

[Koufax32fan]

I am only looking to buy 1 of the Pelty horizontals, for a "fair" price. I am in no hurry.

I don't understand the idea of hoarding, just to hoard. I do have some duplicates - one might be offcenter, one might have better registry, and I just have not found the right one. I am trying to find all of the poses for the Old Judge Doc Oberlander, but that is not hoarding.

A number of years back Ken Holtzman worked at our local JCC so I bought a 100+ lot of his cards on eBay. I thought he might want to hand them out to kids; he wasn't interested. I don't think of that as hoarding. Over time I have been giving them away. Who wants or needs fifteen 1977 Holtzman cards (look at the stache). The kids seem to like to have cards from the 70's (at least for a few minutes).

Is the motivation for hoarding really to try to corner the market and gain some economic advantage? Even the Hunt Brothers learned that is hard to do (or maybe it was the fact that they leveraged themselves to the hilt to buy all that silver). So, who is the guy buying cards of Titus or Pelty on margin?

[Cardboard Junkie]

Originally Posted by sago

IIRC, Don Lepore (dealer from NJ) had 3 Wagners in the late 70's.

Source on this please?Dave.