Book Another Titanic Voyage and Don’t Look Back

The price fall in quality vintage cards is cyclical and interesting but pales in comparison with the volatility of the bucking tiger that is rookie cards.  The run up and giant crash of 99% of rookie cards is as reliable as farts following nachos and beer, yet people keep buying these cards and holding them.  Why?  Why is it with a 50-year history of bad returns that people keep socking away stacks of the next Gregg Jefferies, only to toss them into the recycling bin ten years later? 

I offer a modest explanation by way of eulogy.  Daniel Kahnamen died recently.  Dr. Kahnamen was a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in behavioral economics in 2002.  Essentially, he debunked the orthodox view that people are rational decisionmakers.  That certainly squares with my experience.  I got over thinking people made sense when I started practicing law.  Irrationality in decision-making is so prevalent that the law actually breaks down degrees of being a dumbass into categories (negligence, gross negligence and recklessness), and the distinction between the three is basically the difference between being a fool, a damned fool, and a goddamned fool (kudos to Professor William Prosser for that one).  Heck, if it wasn’t for a steady flow of fools crossing my path, I’d never have had a law career and never been able to afford a card. 

What I found most fascinating about Kahnamen’s theories was his work in determining what interferes with our decisionmaking processes, a set of factors that he called “noise”: our biases, different skills, preferences, experiences, emotions, and group dynamics.  All these issues are prevalent in card collecting decisions, especially rookie card hype.  I think the worst culprit of them in our hobby as it currently exists is group dynamics surrounding rookie cards because it is so readily manipulated.  Once a rookie generates buzz—and buzz can start as early as high school—the card manufacturers and ‘influencers’ run with it, and the sheeple chase the cards in the irrational hope that this time will be different, that this guy will be the generational talent, the Mike Trout and not Kevin Maas.  Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a generational talent literally comes along once in a generation, not multiple times every year.  There have been over 20,000 players in the majors since 1876; there are under 300 players in the Hall of Fame, 1.5% of all players.  Those are very long odds indeed on that stack of rookies really paying off.  Card manufacturers prey on this irrationality. The pace of new issues is torrid, as is the hype of hot prospects.  It’s a ruse, people.  Don’t be misled.  Your chances of hitting a Jeter-esque talent in every year’s rookie crop really, really suck.  As expensive as packs have gotten lately, I’d rather plunk the cash into solid cards of HOFers.  Hoarding current rookies isn’t investing, it is playing a lottery.  Fun, but largely a waste of money. 

I love Johnny Cash and my favorite song of his is “I’ve Been Everywhere”, which is basically a list of rhyming names of places:

I've been to Boston, Charleston, Dayton, Louisiana
Washington, Houston, Kingston, Texarkana
Monterey, Faraday, Santa Fe, Tallapoosa
Glen Rock, Black Rock, Little Rock, Oskaloosa
Tennessee to Tennesse Chicopee, Spirit Lake
Grand Lake, Devils Lake, Crater Lake, for Pete's sake

I've been everywhere, man
I've been everywhere, man
Crossed the desert's bare, man
I've breathed the mountain air, man
Of travel I've had my share, man
I've been everywhere

I think we could make a song like that out of the names of the rookie card flameouts of the last fifty years.  I’ll go first: Super Joe Charboneau… rhyme that.

 

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And now for something completely different.  Major League Baseball at long last reconfigured its record books to fully integrate Negro League stats into the records.  We now have new lifetime leaders in various categories including lifetime Batting Average (Josh Gibson), single season Batting Average (Tetelo Vargas), and a bevvy of new .400 hitters, with the last one being Artie Wilson in 1948. 

The squeals of protest from the interwebs are in full screed mode. 

I find the arguments against integrating the statistics to range from unconvincing to outright silly.  I am not an expert in statistical analysis, and I haven’t got the time or the chops to go through the painstaking process of researching what leagues to check, what seasons to use, and what statistics should be counted, but the stat heads at MLB did.  The process used was as follows, as explained by Anthony Castrovince on MLB.com:

“Following the 2020 announcement that seven different Negro Leagues from 1920-1948 would be recognized as Major Leagues, MLB announced Wednesday that it has followed the recommendations of the independent Negro League Statistical Review Committee in absorbing the available Negro Leagues numbers into the official historical record.”

That committee was chaired by John Thorn, official MLB historian. Members included Bob Kendrick (President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum) and John Labombarda (Elias Sports Bureau, Official Statistician of Major League Baseball), plus other heavy-hitters in the research arena.  In other words, serious professionals who were not interested in wrecking their reputations to make a laughable ‘woke’ gesture. 

The other thing that struck me is that this was not the first time that stats from leagues other than the AL and NL were integrated into the game’s database under controversy.  Again, to quote Castrovince:

“In 1969, MLB’s Special Committee on Baseball Records determined which past professional leagues should be classified alongside the AL and NL as Major Leagues in the first publication of “The Baseball Encyclopedia.” At that time, the committee concluded that the American Association (1882-91), Union Association (1884), Players’ League (1890) and Federal League (1914-15) all qualified.”

This is nothing more or less than an iteration of that process with another professional league that was the top league available for 20% of the population. 

The main argument against including these other major leagues in the official stats had been that the quality of play wasn’t as good as in the ‘real’ majors, as proven by the fact that decent players in MLB were superstars in the other leagues, like Benny Kauff, “the Ty Cobb of the Federal League”.  Apparently, the experts who analyzed the issue concluded otherwise.  The same argument is the principal one against the Negro Leagues: they played a different schedule with seasons that were far shorter than comparable MLB seasons, more like the pandemic season than a ‘real’ season, and aren’t worthy of equality with the AL and NL (well, and the AA, UA, PL and FL, too).  

I don’t buy it.  One twist with regard to the Negro League stats that tends to differentiate them is that there simply were not detailed stats maintained with the same consistency as in the white leagues.  They played a hell of a lot but there are no records of many of the games.  The committee considered that. As a result, the claim that Josh Gibson hit 800 homers was tossed out as unproven.  He may well have done it, but there are no records to support it.  The committee worked with what it had. 

Some people simply deride the quality of play and players as inferior.  There I call bullshit because we actually have a real world test of the quality of Negro League players in MLB game conditions.  Just look at what happened in the first ten years of integration.  Look at the players who came up and what they did.  The NL was the first to integrate and the winners of the MVP awards in seven of those years were black. Also consider the list of notable black players who came into the game from 1947-56 and had an impact at the MLB level:

--Jackie Robinson
--Roy Campanella
--Willie Mays
--Monte Irvin
--Orestes Minoso
--Larry Doby
--Ernie Banks
--Hank Aaron
--Frank Robinson
--Roberto Clemente
--Elston Howard
--Jim Gilliam
--Don Newcombe
--Joe Black
--Hank Thompson
--Luke Easter
--Satchel Paige

There are some others who don't come to my mind readily (I usually see my cards in my head and remember who was who that way). I also note that there were many Negro League players who had MLB skills but no roster spots, or who got very short trials in MLB and were cut down immediately if they were not productive right off the bat never to return; integration was a bitter pill for some teams to swallow.  Mays was one of the lucky ones in that Durocher was not quick to pull that demotion trigger on him after he went 1 for 25 to start in 1951, yet that same year the Giants kicked Artie Wilson back down to the PCL after 24 at-bats produced 4 hits.

My key point is that the black players who entered the Bigs in that first decade comprised an all-star team that could have beaten any white team of the era.  The outfield alone has Aaron (714 homers), Mays (660 homers) and Robinson (586 homers).  That’s some serious artillery.  As I see it, if we can prove, definitively, that the best black players in the first ten years of integration were absolutely spectacular and matched up equally or better with their white counterparts, then I don't see a good argument for asserting that the play in the Negro Leagues was inferior, unless you somehow assume that the players who destroyed MLB records in the early 1950s were an anomalous bunch, which makes no sense and is contrary to the anecdotal testimonials of white players and managers before integration.  

I also don’t buy the different seasons arguments. Bottom line for me is that if NL stats are MLB stats, you can't make distinctions between seasons given how the game was played at a time of segregation; no asterisks on 61, if you will. The Negro League players played the game they had available to them.

OK, enough pontificating.  Let’s talk card investing.  The reshuffling of the record books is a good chance to make some money.  We just got a whole bunch of .400 hitters and high average hitters to collect.  Some have readily acquired cards, like Artie Wilson’s Remar Bread cards from the PCL.  Some have much tougher cards, like the 1932 E. Quintana cards of Vargas from Venezuela.  I like the medium term prospects for these unheralded cards. Some sellers are going to miss this.  By the time the indignation ends and people think about it, those cards are likely to spike in demand as collectors of .400 hitters or leaders in other categories seek to fill in the holes in their collections.  Might be a good time to scour inventories on eBay and elsewhere and snap up any low-hanging fruit.  Happy hunting.