That's because you're trying to use playing performance as a predictor/gauge for collector value which comes down to emotions/popularity and not directly tied to on field characteristics - especially for Tier 1 players who's narratives and stories carry well beyond stats over time
Some players have a lore about them that transcends their statistics or even their championships. Clemente certainly is an example of this. A more modern example would be comparing Kobe Bryant with Tim Duncan. Both started roughly the same time. Both won five championships. Both are in the hall of fame, but the difference in card prices is astounding, and I think that would still apply even without Bryant's untimely passing.
Love the data used to support the argument rather than just shouting into the wind about your favorite player being undervalue or hating on a player you dont like. Stats and data isnt perfect but they help tell a story.
@@SantiagosFakeBeardJoe Morgan: 10x AS, 5 straight GGs, only back-to-back MVP winner at 2B, one of two 1st ballot HOFers to primarily play 2B (Jackie Robinson), 2x WS winner with Big Red Machine, one of 2 players with 250 HR & 600 SB (Henderson), 2nd all-time in games played at 2B, all-time NL leader in put outs at 2B. His rookie card with Sonny Jackson is the first Topps rookie card to only feature African Americans.
Instead of the relative size of WAR, I think a better comparison would be percentile. If one player is at the 99.9th percentile of WAR and the other is at the 99th percentile. Then you could make the argument that player is 10x rarer. I think this comparison would get you closer to the difference in card values. Thanks for the consistently great content.
So good. Thank you. Great video. IMO, these results confirm what I and many others have always believed: DEMAND is the primary factor in FMV. The demand among collectors for owning a Clemente or Lebron card is much higher than collectors who want a Bosh or Wade rookie, thus driving up valuation of the tier one players
Yeah, the problem with the method to assess value is assuming demand is pegged to the war multiplier. I feel like there are 50-100x more Lebron collectors vs Bosh collectors, hence the huge disparity in price. Supply is the same for both players in this example, but the demand for lebron is essentially 50-100 times that of Bosh. In other words everyone is trying to collect Lebron, and very few are collecting Bosh.
I think the WAR Thing confused some people like 'hey, you are trying to gauge collector value with player performance'. Its interesting to show but the expected value with war doesnt have meaning on your argument, that there is an exponential increase in 'GOATS' vs non-goats. What you could have done is use WAR to bucket players into 3 categories. Then fit a linear regression for pop report trying to predict price. The fit wouldn't be good (e.g., low R-squared value), thus showing there isn't a linear relationship. Then you can either 'account for goatness' and show how the exponential fits better.
Looks like an exponential regression line could determined using WAR (or something else) and the actual multipliers to then find a scale factor increase between the two exponential graphs. This scale factor could be compared to other players/sports/etc. Other factors in play of course, but interesting to see :)
It’s like Nolan Ryan I actually don’t think his WAR would be higher than Seaver or Carlton, but Ryan’s rookie and other cards far outpace the other pitchers exponentially
I mentioned this before on other RUclipsr’s comment sections. Most people who watch sports, don’t know these players in and out. Whether it’s modern or vintage, they don’t watch sports that way. They are casual sports fans so the GOATS are the names that stick out and it drives up the price. DWade was a beast in his prime, but he is a player that will be underrated to the next generation that didn’t see him play. The GOATS are the players that sort of stay in pop culture after they retire. You look at rookie cards of Tony Gwynn, Tim Duncan, Steve Carlton, Peyton Manning, and they are undervalued in this hobby. These are great HOF players but they sort of get forgotten once they retire while Kobe, Lebron, Jordan, Gretzky, and Mantle cards are super expensive. It’s part generational and part casual fans that create this price divide between the HOF Goats and the HOF Great players. How many people still talking about Duncan? How many people still talk about Kobe? Both have 5 rings, yet Kobe rookies are 5X more expensive.
Great point, definitely true … there are also so many external factors, like the market and team, championships, celebrity, and notoriety. Clemente is deeply mourned and considered a tragic loss, not only as a player but humanitarian. LeBron has been a national celebrity since he was sixteen, thrived in arguably the peak of the cable and big network era, and has built a “brand” of his life like none other (even Michael Jordan didn’t get his kids on his roster!) - a comp on the 86 Fleer Jordan, Hakeem, and Barkley would be interesting; maybe look at all the HOF rookies in that unique set, given the number of actual draft classes represented in the “rookies” of that set. Awesome discussion point.
It would be sort of fun to have all hof topps baseball rookies from 1952 to 1980 in a variety of grades on a spreadsheet with war of course. You could make a trend equation & see how the r^2 value changes with grade and year. You could see if the year of the card is linear or exponential. Certainly issues like 1871 & series would weaken the correlation
Supply & demand. Every collector wants a rookie of the top tier players. Players like aparicio and dwyane wade have a small fanbase in comparison. Prices can also swing because of the team the player was on or non-playing actions of the player. Yankees players tend to be worth more than they should be. Barry Bonds tends to be worth less than he should be.
For the sake of accuracy/completeness...there are actually five tiers for the HOF. 1) Clemente/Mantle etc 2) Banks 3) Aparicio AND 4) Scott Rolen tier (anyone who is a reliever goes here as well) and 5) Harold Baines tier. The fifth tier is the most exclusive. One member. Doubtful anyone else ever makes it into this exclusive club
Supply is the same but demand is going to be much greater for the GOATS especially a guy like LeBron who might actually be THE goat. If you got 500 of each card but only 100 want the Bosh, 500 want the Wade and 10,000 collectors want the LeBron then that's where the multiplier comes from. I don't even watch that much basketball but I'm basically salivating over that LeBron refractor RC and just indifferent to the other two.
What's your explanation for this phenomenon, Chris? Just demand, demand, demand? That the hobby demands these top-tier players that much more than the next tiers down? Or...?
Yeah I think demand is the key. For every person who wants a Chris Bosh RC, there are 100 people who want a LeBron James RC. Hence the 100x price difference.
Great analysis. Truly yours is a channel for the thinking collector. I wonder however, with the HOF baseball example, established HOF players say 10 years post induction, does the relative value ever really change? Put another way, even with the most rigorous analysis of over/undervalue, can one hope for, or have we ever seem, a dramatic reordering of the vintage pricing hierarchy? Do we just ultimately over time get a gradual and ever increasing expansions of the stars and thier relative multiples. Must be that capitalistic Dark hobby Energy at work.
Top tier players are exponentially rarer than 2nd and 3rd tier-- and there's other factors effecting value...market for instance--- maybe the player just played in front of millions more people and those folks could have more personal/sentimental value? Or, for instance, my beloved Super Sonics don't even exist anymore... less and less people can have that attachment to the team or players?
The million dollar question is when do the most-elite superstars become too expensive? There is a number. If Bosh were $1 and James were $100,000, James would have to be too expensive, right? Certainly a lot of influencers have been saying that one should only invest in the best of the best. I smell a correction….
my guess without having seen the value of the lebron was 7k. it's quite a bit more valuable, it turns out. haha. definitely an important thing to remember if we collect some second tier players.
This is why WAR is dumb. Bert Blyleven WAR higher than Nolan Ryan. Can you imagine someone passing over a $1500 Nolan Ryan rookie to pay $1700 for Bert Blyleven? hahahaha
Sox vs Cubs over war. Clemente's death explains the difference between him and Banks more than stats. There is no way to use numbers to explain why a sports card is more valued. Collecting is subjective not objective.
WAR and Win Share can’t measure key events and character appeal/charisma, but I understand that they are objective measures. I think LBJ’s fat head/ego hurts his appeal and his cards would be even higher if he was more likeable. Thanks for this analysis!
I see what you’re going for but using WAR to gauge the expected value is extremely flawed as there is a max number attached. No one in their right mind would say that Clemente is only 1.7x more popular/culturally important/quality than Aparicio.
You aren't factoring in the size of each of the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 pools. There might be 120x as many Tier 3 players as there are Tier 1 players in NBA history. If you've ever played in an auction based fantasy football league, you see the same thing happen. The Tier 1 QBs go for many multiples of the average QBs because you can't win the league if you just have a team of average players. With regard to collecting, I sometimes use the test, is this a player my 13 year old is aware of? He's a fan, but not a student of any particular sport. If they've made his radar, they are probably Tier 1. Another way to ask this is, will they be talking about this player in 30 years? That test explains why a '81 Topps Kirk Gibson PSA 10 just sold for $9K better than career WAR. If there was a way via social media to test how "top of mind" a player is, that might be interesting.
Stay with me on this one regarding the overall use of WAR as an evaluation tool. The example for this is the 2024 Dodgers, whose overall team WAR was around 40 (39.6). If I am understanding all the nuances of the math correctly, this team should win 40 more games than MLB "average" replacement players. An average team "should" finish 81-81 (bit of an assumption here), giving the Dodgers an expected 121-41 record. Yeah, right. The top WAR players hit 1-4 in the lineup (Ohtani, Betts, Freeman, Teoscar). My minor issue with WAR is that having multiple good WAR players stacked one after another will cause an overlap of that value due to each one influencing the other's WAR value. Lets call it an overlap as opposed to double counting. Feedback is welcome so long as it's constructive. Chris, Absolutely love what you do. You are the Oracle of Delphi, for me, when it comes to card collecting (baseball only for me).
Your mistake here is that you're equating "replacement player" with "average player" but those are two different things. A replacement-level player is a readily available AAAA-type player that any team could acquire at any time for free/league minimum. A team of replacement-level players would not win 81 games; depending on your version of WAR/how you're calculating replacement level, it would be closer to 50 wins, according to FanGraphs/BaseballProspectus/etc. Adding the Dodgers' 40 team WAR to that gets you to 90 wins, which is obviously a bit short of their 98, but that speaks a bit more to the randomness of baseball than the flaws of WAR as a stat, especially since adding wins like that isn't really the intent of WAR. WAR is far from a perfect stat but it's very useful as an estimator of overall value/performance, and by far the best single statistic we have for that.
Trying to rationalize the irrational is fun
That's because you're trying to use playing performance as a predictor/gauge for collector value which comes down to emotions/popularity and not directly tied to on field characteristics - especially for Tier 1 players who's narratives and stories carry well beyond stats over time
Was thinking similarly about banks. Mr Cub is a pretty iconic nickname.
Bo Jackson goes beyond stats.
Card Master 😎
Fantastic and well delivered analysis.
Some players have a lore about them that transcends their statistics or even their championships. Clemente certainly is an example of this.
A more modern example would be comparing Kobe Bryant with Tim Duncan. Both started roughly the same time. Both won five championships. Both are in the hall of fame, but the difference in card prices is astounding, and I think that would still apply even without Bryant's untimely passing.
Love the data used to support the argument rather than just shouting into the wind about your favorite player being undervalue or hating on a player you dont like. Stats and data isnt perfect but they help tell a story.
Joe Morgan, with 100.6 WAR, seems to be undervalued. He and Seaver are the two 100+ WAR players with 1960s rookie cards.
Yeah but who was a Joe Morgan fan when you had all the other greats. It’s like being a Harold Bains fan. 😂
@@SantiagosFakeBeardLol
@@SantiagosFakeBeardJoe Morgan: 10x AS, 5 straight GGs, only back-to-back MVP winner at 2B, one of two 1st ballot HOFers to primarily play 2B (Jackie Robinson), 2x WS winner with Big Red Machine, one of 2 players with 250 HR & 600 SB (Henderson), 2nd all-time in games played at 2B, all-time NL leader in put outs at 2B. His rookie card with Sonny Jackson is the first Topps rookie card to only feature African Americans.
One factor to take into note is that the Clemente is a high number! Great video as always Chris
Only Chris could make math fun!!!!
Instead of the relative size of WAR, I think a better comparison would be percentile. If one player is at the 99.9th percentile of WAR and the other is at the 99th percentile. Then you could make the argument that player is 10x rarer. I think this comparison would get you closer to the difference in card values.
Thanks for the consistently great content.
Came to leave a suggestion like this and you beat me to it!
Great point!
I’d like to nominate Mr. Sewall as the first Justice of the Supreme Court of Sports Cards!
⚖️👨⚖️
Good video, Chris. Gold, silver, bronze. Always bet on the fastest horse in the race, or in this case, the most popular horse in the race.
So good. Thank you. Great video. IMO, these results confirm what I and many others have always believed: DEMAND is the primary factor in FMV. The demand among collectors for owning a Clemente or Lebron card is much higher than collectors who want a Bosh or Wade rookie, thus driving up valuation of the tier one players
Yeah, the problem with the method to assess value is assuming demand is pegged to the war multiplier. I feel like there are 50-100x more Lebron collectors vs Bosh collectors, hence the huge disparity in price. Supply is the same for both players in this example, but the demand for lebron is essentially 50-100 times that of Bosh. In other words everyone is trying to collect Lebron, and very few are collecting Bosh.
I think the WAR Thing confused some people like 'hey, you are trying to gauge collector value with player performance'. Its interesting to show but the expected value with war doesnt have meaning on your argument, that there is an exponential increase in 'GOATS' vs non-goats.
What you could have done is use WAR to bucket players into 3 categories. Then fit a linear regression for pop report trying to predict price. The fit wouldn't be good (e.g., low R-squared value), thus showing there isn't a linear relationship. Then you can either 'account for goatness' and show how the exponential fits better.
The main point I get out of this is 3rd tier should not be in the Hall of FAME. We all knew this, but for you to spell it out is fascinating.
Great dive into this, Chris. Nice to have the data. Thanks for sharing.
Looks like an exponential regression line could determined using WAR (or something else) and the actual multipliers to then find a scale factor increase between the two exponential graphs. This scale factor could be compared to other players/sports/etc. Other factors in play of course, but interesting to see :)
Amazing examples
It’s like Nolan Ryan
I actually don’t think his WAR would be higher than Seaver or Carlton, but Ryan’s rookie and other cards far outpace the other pitchers exponentially
Chris, don`t forget to tell your research department to eat their veggies, so they have enough strength to keep up with your stringent demands. 👍🥦🥬🥕🥔
I mentioned this before on other RUclipsr’s comment sections. Most people who watch sports, don’t know these players in and out. Whether it’s modern or vintage, they don’t watch sports that way. They are casual sports fans so the GOATS are the names that stick out and it drives up the price.
DWade was a beast in his prime, but he is a player that will be underrated to the next generation that didn’t see him play. The GOATS are the players that sort of stay in pop culture after they retire.
You look at rookie cards of Tony Gwynn, Tim Duncan, Steve Carlton, Peyton Manning, and they are undervalued in this hobby. These are great HOF players but they sort of get forgotten once they retire while Kobe, Lebron, Jordan, Gretzky, and Mantle cards are super expensive. It’s part generational and part casual fans that create this price divide between the HOF Goats and the HOF Great players. How many people still talking about Duncan? How many people still talk about Kobe? Both have 5 rings, yet Kobe rookies are 5X more expensive.
Very well stated
Very interesting. Love the content as always!
Great point, definitely true … there are also so many external factors, like the market and team, championships, celebrity, and notoriety. Clemente is deeply mourned and considered a tragic loss, not only as a player but humanitarian. LeBron has been a national celebrity since he was sixteen, thrived in arguably the peak of the cable and big network era, and has built a “brand” of his life like none other (even Michael Jordan didn’t get his kids on his roster!) - a comp on the 86 Fleer Jordan, Hakeem, and Barkley would be interesting; maybe look at all the HOF rookies in that unique set, given the number of actual draft classes represented in the “rookies” of that set. Awesome discussion point.
It would be sort of fun to have all hof topps baseball rookies from 1952 to 1980 in a variety of grades on a spreadsheet with war of course. You could make a trend equation & see how the r^2 value changes with grade and year. You could see if the year of the card is linear or exponential. Certainly issues like 1871 & series would weaken the correlation
Team/Media market has a large effect on popularity of a HOF player
and thus their card value.
Research department doing some OT work. Keep looking for that "Time Machine".
Maybe we need a fudge factor for "hype".
Supply & demand. Every collector wants a rookie of the top tier players. Players like aparicio and dwyane wade have a small fanbase in comparison. Prices can also swing because of the team the player was on or non-playing actions of the player. Yankees players tend to be worth more than they should be. Barry Bonds tends to be worth less than he should be.
Great analysis Chris and something I think about all the time.
Like the charts and math here!
Thx for doing the math, Chris. So interesting! I guess I’m not surprised.
Awesome video really enjoyed it
The Math nerd in me is laughing with an extra snort after watching this. Would love to see an NFL example with Brady, Manning and Roethlisberger.
I think a modern baseball one would have been interesting and have more parody.
For the sake of accuracy/completeness...there are actually five tiers for the HOF. 1) Clemente/Mantle etc 2) Banks 3) Aparicio AND 4) Scott Rolen tier (anyone who is a reliever goes here as well) and 5) Harold Baines tier. The fifth tier is the most exclusive. One member. Doubtful anyone else ever makes it into this exclusive club
Great video Chris! Thanks!
Supply is the same but demand is going to be much greater for the GOATS especially a guy like LeBron who might actually be THE goat. If you got 500 of each card but only 100 want the Bosh, 500 want the Wade and 10,000 collectors want the LeBron then that's where the multiplier comes from. I don't even watch that much basketball but I'm basically salivating over that LeBron refractor RC and just indifferent to the other two.
You also have to consider popularity and likeability.
A great example of sport good does not equal hobby good. Plenty of guys seem undervalued based off relative performance but popularity is important.
Love this video! Great job, Chris!
Fascinating video, love these analytical deep dives
What's your explanation for this phenomenon, Chris? Just demand, demand, demand? That the hobby demands these top-tier players that much more than the next tiers down? Or...?
Yeah I think demand is the key. For every person who wants a Chris Bosh RC, there are 100 people who want a LeBron James RC. Hence the 100x price difference.
Yeah, this hits right ;)
Great analysis. Truly yours is a channel for the thinking collector.
I wonder however, with the HOF baseball example, established HOF players say 10 years post induction, does the relative value ever really change? Put another way, even with the most rigorous analysis of over/undervalue, can one hope for, or have we ever seem, a dramatic reordering of the vintage pricing hierarchy? Do we just ultimately over time get a gradual and ever increasing expansions of the stars and thier relative multiples. Must be that capitalistic Dark hobby Energy at work.
Great question!
Position has to be considered, too - hitters over pitchers, scorers over defense, quarterbacks over every other position …
Top tier players are exponentially rarer than 2nd and 3rd tier-- and there's other factors effecting value...market for instance--- maybe the player just played in front of millions more people and those folks could have more personal/sentimental value? Or, for instance, my beloved Super Sonics don't even exist anymore... less and less people can have that attachment to the team or players?
Hi Chris, enjoyed watching this video.
I'm curious if switching to a logarithmic scale for price brings the trend back in line or not 🤔
The million dollar question is when do the most-elite superstars become too expensive? There is a number. If Bosh were $1 and James were $100,000, James would have to be too expensive, right? Certainly a lot of influencers have been saying that one should only invest in the best of the best. I smell a correction….
my guess without having seen the value of the lebron was 7k. it's quite a bit more valuable, it turns out. haha. definitely an important thing to remember if we collect some second tier players.
Bo Jackson is an interesting outlier … his card values will outweigh HOF players in two leagues.
great video Chris
This is why WAR is dumb. Bert Blyleven WAR higher than Nolan Ryan. Can you imagine someone passing over a $1500 Nolan Ryan rookie to pay $1700 for Bert Blyleven? hahahaha
The Hobby is winner take all or winner take most. Even if you think MJ was 5x better than Clyde Drexler, MJ rookie psa 10 is 150x Clyde
Sox vs Cubs over war. Clemente's death explains the difference between him and Banks more than stats. There is no way to use numbers to explain why a sports card is more valued. Collecting is subjective not objective.
Chris, can I work in your research department?
This is pretty much why you should only collect the biggest names, unless you have personal or connected reasons to collect other particular player.
I think you're confusing collecting with investing. One collects because they like. One invests because they are trying to make a profit.
Nice vid but does this not just prove that WAR is a pointless metric and not much else
WAR and Win Share can’t measure key events and character appeal/charisma, but I understand that they are objective measures. I think LBJ’s fat head/ego hurts his appeal and his cards would be even higher if he was more likeable. Thanks for this analysis!
You left it unsaid, Chris, and maybe it goes without saying:: Prices are driven by demand, not WAR or Win Share.
I see what you’re going for but using WAR to gauge the expected value is extremely flawed as there is a max number attached. No one in their right mind would say that Clemente is only 1.7x more popular/culturally important/quality than Aparicio.
Agreed
There you go again....trying to apply logic to the sports card industry/hobby/virtual casino....great video, though!
❤
Goatani.
You aren't factoring in the size of each of the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 pools. There might be 120x as many Tier 3 players as there are Tier 1 players in NBA history. If you've ever played in an auction based fantasy football league, you see the same thing happen. The Tier 1 QBs go for many multiples of the average QBs because you can't win the league if you just have a team of average players.
With regard to collecting, I sometimes use the test, is this a player my 13 year old is aware of? He's a fan, but not a student of any particular sport. If they've made his radar, they are probably Tier 1. Another way to ask this is, will they be talking about this player in 30 years? That test explains why a '81 Topps Kirk Gibson PSA 10 just sold for $9K better than career WAR. If there was a way via social media to test how "top of mind" a player is, that might be interesting.
Great points
Stay with me on this one regarding the overall use of WAR as an evaluation tool. The example for this is the 2024 Dodgers, whose overall team WAR was around 40 (39.6). If I am understanding all the nuances of the math correctly, this team should win 40 more games than MLB "average" replacement players. An average team "should" finish 81-81 (bit of an assumption here), giving the Dodgers an expected 121-41 record. Yeah, right.
The top WAR players hit 1-4 in the lineup (Ohtani, Betts, Freeman, Teoscar). My minor issue with WAR is that having multiple good WAR players stacked one after another will cause an overlap of that value due to each one influencing the other's WAR value. Lets call it an overlap as opposed to double counting.
Feedback is welcome so long as it's constructive.
Chris,
Absolutely love what you do. You are the Oracle of Delphi, for me, when it comes to card collecting (baseball only for me).
Your mistake here is that you're equating "replacement player" with "average player" but those are two different things. A replacement-level player is a readily available AAAA-type player that any team could acquire at any time for free/league minimum. A team of replacement-level players would not win 81 games; depending on your version of WAR/how you're calculating replacement level, it would be closer to 50 wins, according to FanGraphs/BaseballProspectus/etc. Adding the Dodgers' 40 team WAR to that gets you to 90 wins, which is obviously a bit short of their 98, but that speaks a bit more to the randomness of baseball than the flaws of WAR as a stat, especially since adding wins like that isn't really the intent of WAR. WAR is far from a perfect stat but it's very useful as an estimator of overall value/performance, and by far the best single statistic we have for that.
Statistically, Clemente seems to be pretty overrated. Heck, I'd take Paul Molitor over Clemente. But that's just me.