This week I’m going to be taking a look at how the Cycle 460 subset compares to the American Beauty 350 No Frame subset. T206resource.com has American Beauty 350 No Frame as the 15th scarcest back in the T206 set, and Cycle 460 as the 17th. It’s important to remember that back scarcity lists such as the one posted on T206resource.com are an attempt to list the backs in order of aggregate scarcity. In other words, this list is simply saying less American Beauty 350 No Frame backs exist than Cycle 460 backs.
Attempting to compare the overall populations of these two backs is a little bit tricky because the checklists are of such dissimliar size. As mentioned in Part Two of this series, the Cycle 460 Subset consists of 109 different poses, while there are only 37 poses in the American Beauty 350 No Frame checklist. What this means is that there are 2.95 times (but I’ll round it up to 3x for simplicity’s sake) more poses in the Cycle 460 subset than in the American Beauty 350 No Frame Subset. So, in order for these two backs to have a similar total population, the average individual American Beauty 350 No Frame pose would have to be about 3 times as plentiful as the average Cycle 460 pose.
My Hypothesis:
That 3:1 ratio actually sounded about right to me before I began to research the Pop Report. I expecting to find a ratio at or around 3:1 and it wouldn’t have surprised me to find that it was even higher (meaning that Cycle 460 backs are scarcer than American Beauty 350 No Frame). Let’s take a look at the table below to see what the actual results look like.
Links to checklists, courtesy of t206resource.com:
Explanation of Research*:
In Part Two of this series, when comparing Brown Hindu Populations to Cycle 460 Populations, I had to use two different poses of the same player. This is because there is no crossover between poses in the Brown Hindu and Cycle 460 subsets. Brown Hindu backs were printed exclusively on 150-350 Series subjects in 1909 while Cycle 460 backs were printed in 1911 and feature only poses from the 350-460 Series, 460 Only Series, and the Super Prints.
The research for this article is a bit more straightforward, because we can look at a single pose rather than two different poses featuring the same player. 36 of the 37 poses in the American Beauty 350 No Frame Subset were also printed with a Cycle 460 back**. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use PSA Pop Report data for all 36 poses. Most of the poses that were printed with an American Beauty 350 No Frame back were also printed with an American Beauty 460 back. Because PSA used a generic “American Beauty” label for a number of years, it’s impossible to get reliable Pop Report data for the players who were printed with both backs***. This meant I had to use just the poses in the American Beauty 350 No Frame Subset that were not also printed with an American Beauty 460 back. That left me with the 15 poses in the table below.
As you can see, the PSA Population of American Beauty 350 No Frames outnumber Cycle 460s 148 to 65, for a ratio of 2.28:1. This falls short of the 3:1 ratio required for the total Populations of each back to be roughly equal. I was expecting to find the Cycle 460 Population marginally scarcer than American Beauty 350 No Frame. However, the results strongly indicate that American Beauty 350 No Frame backs are indeed scarcer than Cycle 460 backs.
*Throughout this series of articles, I have used only the PSA Pop Reports to test the hypothesis. I chose to do this for a couple different reasons. First, the PSA Pop Report is a little easier (and quicker) to use when checking a number of different players with the same back. Secondly, there can be some confusion on the SGC Pop Reports when a player has one pose that was printed with a Brown Hindu back and another pose that was printed with a Red Hindu back. The same holds true for American Beauty 350 With Frame & American Beauty 350 No Frame. I wanted to have data that was completely uniform and I didn’t want to use any entry that included any ambiguity.
**The lone exception is Simon Nichols batting, which was pulled from production before Cycle 460 backs were printed.
***In a previous article entitled “Understanding the American Beauty backs: T206 American Beauty 350 no frame (Part 3/4)“, I used both the PSA and SGC Pop Reports in order to make an educated guess at the total graded population of each pose in the American Beauty 350 No Frame subset.
