Minor league cards

[BioCRN]

For modern minor league cards, a lot depends on the pool of player collectors once you get into junk wax era and beyond.

Rarity doesn't always matter, but rarity starts to actually matter at a certain point of number of collectors and the price starts to show up.

It seems elementary and "no duh" and all that, but there's a huge amount of people that will buy a RC that don't care about a player's minor league "RC" in comparison.

Personally experienced example, Mark Grace's 1986 Peoria card in NM/M+ condition could easily be picked up for $5-ish after the junk wax era died. It stayed that way for a very long time. During the recent COVID era hobby resurgence the card not only went up in price, it went up in popularity enough that you're looking at $35-40 for a raw copy in that kind of shape and a premium for graded examples. Almost everything spiked in price during this era, but not everything got a 7-8x value jump. The number of people wanting one finally caught up to the availability.

[bk400]

Originally Posted by BioCRN

For modern minor league cards, a lot depends on the pool of player collectors once you get into junk wax era and beyond.

Rarity doesn't always matter, but rarity starts to actually matter at a certain point of number of collectors and the price starts to show up.

It seems elementary and "no duh" and all that, but there's a huge amount of people that will buy a RC that don't care about a player's minor league "RC" in comparison.

Personally experienced example, Mark Grace's 1986 Peoria card in NM/M+ condition could easily be picked up for $5-ish after the junk wax era died. It stayed that way for a long very long time. During the recent COVID era hobby resurgence the card not only went up in price, it went up in popularity enough that you're looking at $35-40 for a raw copy in that kind of shape and a premium for graded examples. Almost everything spiked in price during this era, but not everything got a 7-8x value jump. The number of people wanting one finally caught up to the availability.

And this is exactly the dynamic that I've seen a bit of as well.

When I returned to the hobby, I was quickly turned off by modern players having what seemed like hundreds of cards with the "RC" logo. So I found it fun to do a little bit of work (and it really isn't all that much work to use Google) to find those players' first minor league cards.

At the time of printing, these guys were not even prospects, and the manufacturers kind of have a junior varsity feel about them -- so definitionally, very low print runs.

A Mookie Betts 2014 Topps Heritage in PSA 10 (population of about 1,000) sells for $300. In contrast, I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 Mookie Betts Lowell Spinners cards printed in total. The price has already moved up on those cards, but it's more like the Mark Grace that you describe.

I get Peter's point that the market is what it is, and there is no why. But as a collector (if not an investor), I find the Lowell card irresistibly more interesting.