Non-Iowa Thursday: Looking at TCDB collection data

So, this may be the first in a few posts, but let me tell you where my brain started. We can assume that there are certain players that are collected more than others.  You are more likely to run into a Aaron Judge or Ronald Acuna collector than a Ryan Jeffers or John Means collector.  Fair?  I also run the assumption that I will find more Yankees collectors than Padres, but this one I a bit more dubious on.  While Yankees have the most fans, I imagine the confines of living in New York hurt collecting at scale, much less so than a collector in Missouri collecting Royals.

If I dig into the numbers on TCDB, will I see a larger number of wants for specific teams, players, sets, or other things?  Will it be statistically significant?  Will this be to hard to do manually?

Well, I started this idea with grand hopes, only to find that I need to invest some time into learning how to code a bot to scour the website for the data rather than me digging into myself, because it is a slog.  So, hopefully I'll have a post later this year after I've cracked that nut.

However, the time I've spent so far shall not go completely wasted as I can report some initial findings.  I started with 2020 Topps, as we've had enough time to update our collections pretty good at this point, and 2020 is a round number.  I made it through 79 non-sp cards before my mind melted, but it gives us a starting point.  

TCDB has three numbers for each card that we are concerning ourselves with:

1. Collection: Number of cards in an user's collection.  This could be player collections, team collections, set collections, or other.
2. Want: Number of users that want this card in their collection.  
3. Trade/Sell: Number of user that have this card not a part of their collection, but available for trade or sale.

For 2020 Topps, the number of cards in collections ranges from 1065-1227 with an average of 1111.  Wants sit between 11-71 with about 22 on average.  Plenty available for trade, with 83-214 available of each card with the average being near 183.

With such a small sample, its tough to draw any strong conclusions, but we can start to see some trends.  No team stuck out (yet) as more desired, but Miami so far has stuck out as being on the low end.   

You can see the Wants average pulled way down, that's because Wants are affected by a little symbol on the card that says RC.  RCs average 33 and veterans were at 20.  The only significant deviations were Aaron Judge at 36 Wants and Mike Trout as 52 for the veterans.  For the rookies, poor Bobby Brandley only had 17 Wants, while Bo Bichette torched everyone with 71 Wants.

The least cards available for trade align pretty nicely with the cards most desired.  That is because over the last 2 years those transactions have been made.  Bichette again breaks the scale with just 83 available for trade, and the rookies/Trout/Judge making up the bottom of the list.  Bichette is the only one approaching a 1:1 want/trade ratio at 1.16 cards available for each card wanted.  Trout is at 2.44, and most hover in the 8-10 range.  Andrew Heaney is our winner with 18 cards available for each one wanted.  

So, macro trends I think I see.  People love collecting Topps sets, as I can see there are tons of collected cards that don't shift numbers much at the common level across the set.  Some teams are less desired, rookies remain kings, and just the elite players make much of a dent.  

So I have more data, but I'll save that for next week.  What about other 2020 Topps sets?  What about Topps from the past?