Jun 9, 2026 · 16 min · 10 segments
Out of the 10 biggest names in 1952 Topps, only four beat the S&P 500 over 22 years. We pulled 9,720 real sales back to 2004, ran every PSA grade through three market cycles, and spoiler alert, the…
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For this exercise, I looked at 1952 Topps baseball, and I looked at the top 10 cards to my eye.
Players that I chose for this were Mickey Mantle, the Eddie Matthews rookie card, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Bob Feller, Duke Schneider, Warren Spahn, Johnny Mize, Roy Campanella, and the Hoyt Wilhelm rookie card.
Now, I'm sure most of my listeners have heard of all 10 of those players, and I would bet a lot of money that three or four of them is known by every single person listening to this podcast.
But one of the critical questions that I've been trying to solve as I've gotten into sports cards is, in a market where we have so many choices and the ability to buy so many different cards, which of these cards are the right choice if we could go back in time? Maybe none of these cards actually could outperform the S&P 500, but that's something we're going to get to a little bit later.
So I told you guys the 10 players that I'm going to be looking at.
The number of sales that I analyzed for this exercise is nine thousand seven hundred and twenty.
Nine thousand seven hundred and twenty sales in order to look across every single grade of PSA for all 10 of these players.
Everything from authentic up to PSA 10, which usually didn't have much data for it.
Now, I could have just stopped there, but I'm a rabbit hole guy, and I went down a rabbit hole and I thought to myself, "What if I look at the different market cycles that we've had in this entire time period that I'm trying to study?" And I haven't told you what that time period is quite yet.
For this exercise, I looked at 1952 Topps baseball, and I looked at the top 10 cards to my eye.
Players that I chose for this were Mickey Mantle, the Eddie Matthews rookie card, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, Bob Feller, Duke Schneider, Warren Spahn, Johnny Mize, Roy Campanella, and the Hoyt Wilhelm rookie card.
Now, I'm sure most of my listeners have heard of all 10 of those players, and I would bet a lot of money that three or four of them is known by every single person listening to this podcast.
But one of the critical questions that I've been trying to solve as I've gotten into sports cards is, in a market where we have so many choices and the ability to buy so many different cards, which of these cards are the right choice if we could go back in time? Maybe none of these cards actually could outperform the S&P 500, but that's something we're going to get to a little bit later.
So I told you guys the 10 players that I'm going to be looking at.
The number of sales that I analyzed for this exercise is nine thousand seven hundred and twenty.
Nine thousand seven hundred and twenty sales in order to look across every single grade of PSA for all 10 of these players.
Everything from authentic up to PSA 10, which usually didn't have much data for it.
Now, I could have just stopped there, but I'm a rabbit hole guy, and I went down a rabbit hole and I thought to myself, "What if I look at the different market cycles that we've had in this entire time period that I'm trying to study?" And I haven't told you what that time period is quite yet.
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