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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Yount-O-Graph


I was bored today.  I don't know if you can tell, but I decided to play around with some numbers.  Below we have all the Robin Yount cards currently on the Trading Card Database in graph form.  Just to illustrate some points.

Couple things.  First, the TCB is by no means complete. Meaning that there are a lot of cards, oddballs and sets that need insert checklists. So we have to take these numbers with a grain of salt.  I didn't use Beckett.com's database, because I don't have access.  Second, most of the Police issue cards from the 80's are not represented.  I do believe that at least one card is in the numbers, but all the different city variations are not. Third most of the MSA discs from 1977 are also not represented right now and  I used my own count for 2014 cards, as I believe it to be much more accurate.


So here we have the card graphed by year issued.  And I have the data table below if you're looking for the counts.


1975 4
1976 6
1977 7
1978 4
1979 4
1980 3
1981 11
1982 12
1983 33
1984 28
1985 17
1986 26
1987 22
1988 29
1989 42
1990 73
1991 36
1992 52
1993 61
1994 24
1995 10
1996 0
1997 0
1998 0
1999 10
2000 21
2001 69
2002 122
2003 161
2004 473
2005 1000
2006 238
2007 135
2008 470
2009 134
2010 61
2011 56
2012 92
2013 125
2014 271

So what can we shine from this?  Well we can see the the bump in issue when Donruss and Fleer entered the competition in 1981.  We can also see when inserts were starting to take off in the late 80's and early 90's and we can see that Robin has been issued almost 7 times more cards since he retired than when he played. I consider his playing days cards 1975 to 1994 even though he retired in 1993 because he was issued regular base cards in almost every set that year.

We can also see that the biggest year for Yount cards was 2005.  Holy crap that's a lot of cards.  What happened in 2005?  Donruss and Upper Deck had a competition to see which company could put out the most sets with the most parallels.  And not just once, but multiple times.  I think Robin has over 100 cards issued in 2005 Donruss Diamond Kings alone.  We can see that 2005 was not only the biggest year, it was the biggest year by over double any other year.  The next biggest year being a toss up between 2004 and 2008.  We can also see a dip from Donruss' exit from the baseball card market and their brief return in 2008.  We can see the dip caused by Topps exclusivity and we can see the current uptick brought about by Panini coming back in with a lot of Hall of Fame focused sets.

I don't think we'll ever see the numbers like in the mid 2000's again, but that's ok. I'm happy that Robin has averaged over 200 new cards a year since 1999. That just means there's always going to be more to chase

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