The second-year Jordan costs about a tenth as much. The second-year Mays costs almost the same.

How this was measured

We compared each rookie with the player's next-year card at the same PSA grade, with qualified cards left out, using the asking prices of cards this index tracks and requiring at least three examples at a grade before comparing it. Everything below is a ratio between two cards, not a price, so it stays true as individual listings come and go.

Four players have enough of both cards to compare: Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. The vintage figures rest on a handful of examples each and should be read as indications; the Jordan and Gretzky figures are firmer.

The ordinary case: a small, steady fraction

Michael Jordan. His 1987-88 Fleer card asks between roughly one-eleventh and one-fourteenth of his 1986-87 Fleer rookie, and it does so at every grade from PSA 4 to PSA 9. Six grades, the same answer each time.

That steadiness is the notable part. The market is not pricing the rookie as a better object at the top and a similar one at the bottom. It is applying one premium for the word rookie, all the way down the grade ladder.

Wayne Gretzky. His 1980-81 card, number 250, asks about one-twentieth of his 1979 rookie. That holds for both printings, O-Pee-Chee and Topps, through the middle grades.

One wrinkle: at PSA 8 the O-Pee-Chee gap widens to nearer one in thirty. That fits what we found in why so few O-Pee-Chee rookies grade high: the rookie gets scarcer at the top of the grade scale faster than the card that followed it, so the premium grows where the rookie is hardest to find.

The year after is cheaper still. Jordan's 1988-89 Fleer asks about one-fiftieth of the rookie, again consistently across grades.

The exception: the second-year card in a landmark set

Mays and Mantle both had two cards in 1952, one from Bowman and one from Topps. The two tell completely different stories.

The 1952 Bowman cards behave normally. Mantle's 1952 Bowman asks about a quarter of his 1951 Bowman rookie. Mays's 1952 Bowman asks about a quarter of his 1952 Topps.

The 1952 Topps cards do not. Mays's 1952 Topps asks around nine-tenths of his rookie at the grade where both can be compared. Mantle's goes further: we found in the piece on cards #311 and #261 that his 1952 Topps asks several times his rookie.

Same players, same year, second-year cards both. One costs a quarter of the rookie, the other costs about the same or more. The difference is the set.

Why the set matters more than the year

1952 Topps was the first large Topps baseball set and it is, for a great many collectors, the set that defines the post-war hobby. Owning its Mantle or its Mays is a goal in its own right, independent of the fact that each had an earlier card.

So a second-year card competes with the rookie on two terms: what it is for the player, and what it is for its set. An ordinary set gives it nothing on the second term, and the rookie premium stands at ten or twenty to one. A landmark set gives it a claim of its own, and the premium shrinks, disappears or, in Mantle's case with the scarce high numbers on top, reverses.

What to take from it

The rookie premium is a price for a label, and it is surprisingly consistent. For Jordan, the market charges roughly the same multiple for the word rookie whether the card is a 4 or a 9.

So a collector who wants the player rather than the label gets a great deal for the difference. A second-year Jordan graded 9 asks less than his rookie graded 4, from the same years of his career and the same manufacturer.

But check what set the second-year card is in. Where it belongs to a landmark issue, the discount that makes the second year attractive may simply not be there.

And watch the top grades. Where the rookie is hard to find in high condition, as with the O-Pee-Chee Gretzky, the gap widens at the top of the scale.

The thing worth sitting with

Two cards of Willie Mays, printed a year apart, one in each of the great card sets of the early 1950s, ask almost the same. Two cards of Michael Jordan, printed a year apart by the same company, sit ten to one.

The first card of a career is worth a premium. How large depends mostly on what the second card was part of.

This index tracks each player's early cards grade by grade, which is what makes a like-for-like comparison possible. You can read how we work the numbers out, and there is a related piece on what a PSA qualifier costs.

Sources