For the last installment of this series, we’re going to take a look at how the the Cycle 460 Subset compares to the American Beauty 460 Subset in terms of scarcity. There are 75* poses in the American Beauty 460 Subset and 109 in the Cycle 460 Subset. All 75* poses in the American Beauty 460 Subset were also printed with Cycle 460 backs. Because of this, we have a nice large sample of poses to use for comparison.
Checklists for each back, courtesy of T206resource.com:
My Hypothesis:
Before beginning to research the Pop Reports, I had the following expectation: I thought that overall, there would be more American Beauty 460s in the PSA Pop Report than Cycle 460s. The main reason for this is the “Exclusive 12”. These 12 poses are quite plentiful with American Beauty 460, in stark contrast to the other poses in the subset. Part of the reason I wanted to publish this series of articles was to show people how Cycle 460s are definitively scarcer than American Beauty 460 in an aggregate sense. However, I knew certain American Beauty 460 poses are near impossible to find, while the average Cycle 460 pose is scarce, but not bordering on unique. I was expecting to find if I removed the Exclusive 12 poses from the data, the remaining American Beauty 460s would have a lower Pop than the Cycle 460s. Let’s take a look at the data I compiled below.
Explanation of Research**:
19 of the 75 poses in the American Beauty 460 Subset were also printed with an American Beauty 350 No Frame back. Because PSA used a generic “American Beauty” label for a number of years, there’s no way to differentiate between American Beauty 350 No Frame and American Beauty 460 for those 19 poses. Which that left me with 56 poses to research. I began by creating a table with all 56 poses, located below. The “Exclusive 12” poses are highlighted in yellow.
As you can see, American Beauty 460 backs outnumber Cycle 460s by a fairly large margin. But take a look at the highlighted entries. The “Exclusive 12” have skewed the data so much that it looks like Cycle 460 is the scarcer back. And it doesn’t look close. In an aggregate sense, Cycle 460 is the scarcer back. Cycle 460 should be ranked above American Beauty 460 on a Back Scarcity Ranking list. But, if we remove the outliers (the Exclusive 12 poses) from the data, is Cycle 460 still the scarcer back?
This table consists of 44 poses (the 56 poses above, minus the Exclusive 12 poses). It gives us a much clearer picture of the situation. It appears from this set of data that the remaining American Beauty 460 poses are scarcer than the remaining Cycle 460 poses. Because the totals are so close, these results don’t necessarily prove anything. However, I think it’s safe to conclude that Exclusive 12 poses aside, American Beauty 460 and Cycle 460 poses exist in very similar quantities.
*At the moment, there is some question as to whether Ames Hands Above Head actually exists with American Beauty 460 back. For now, it is in the checklist, and I included the pose in the research. In the future I could see it being removed from the checklist if no collectors are able to find one.
**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.