Whats changed? Part 2 - Nolan Ryan.

So this is part two of an ongoing series of the increase or decrease of card values over the past ten years. You can find part one here which features Bonds and Griffey Jr.

This time around I wanted to focus on two pitchers. I asked for suggestions for the pitchers to feature and the only suggestion that was made was Nolan Ryan. Thanks for getting involved Captain Canuck.

So I'm just featuring Ryan in this post and then tomorrow I'm going to take a look at Roger Clemens. I figure since I featured a clean player last time (Griffey) and a known juicer (Bonds) it would be interesting to do that again but since I'm going more in depth it will be split over two posts.

Now to remind you, my source materials are Tuff Stuff from April 2000 and Beckett from August 2010. I'm not saying that I believe that these prices are what you should be paying because we all know that 75% of the time sale value is nowhere near book value.

This is going to be longer than the last post because I'm going to feature all the base cards from Topps and if there is an auto listed in Tuff Stuff I will feature that too.

So here's Nolan Ryan's cards. The first price is Tuff Stuff and the second is Beckett.
All cards are NM.

1968 Topps RC - $900/$500
1969 Topps - $450/$200
1970 Topps - $375/$200
1971 Topps - $250/$150
1972 Topps - $200/$100
1973 Topps - $75/$50
1974 Topps - $75/$40
1975 Topps - $65/$50
1976 Topps - $70/$25
1977 Topps - $35/$20
1978 Topps - $35/$25
1979 Topps - $30/$20
1980 Topps - $20/$15
1981 Topps - $8/$8
1982 Topps - $8/$6
1983 Topps - $7/$6
1984 Topps - $4/$3
1985 Topps - $3/$3
1986 Topps - $2/$2
1987 Topps - $1/$1
1988 Topps - $.75/$1 - The first increase!
1989 Topps - $.75/$1
1990 Topps - $.75/$1
1991 Topps - $.60/$1.50
1992 Topps - $1/$1
1993 Topps - $1.50/$2
1994 Topps - $1/$2
1999 SP Signatures auto - $275/$150

I did not expect the massive drop in value for Ryan over the years and I'm very surprised that his cards from the junk era have held or have even gone up. Sure they only went up by a fraction but its still an increase.
The vast majority of his cards have gone down on average by 50% over the years. I honestly believed that like Mickey Mantle cards, Ryan would hold its value and would have been a great investment.
On a side note SP sigs from 1999 looked like an amazing product with a huge autograph list. According to the brief write up in Tuff Stuff, it was one auto per pack. No idea on how much it cost though, but judging from the card values back then I'm guessing it was expensive. I did a search on the bay to see if there were any boxes but there wasn't.
Ryan also had an auto in Topps 1999 but I can only find the prices from Beckett 2010 so I could not do a comparison.

Next I will be looking at Roger Clemens but who else would you like to see featured? You can only choose a player that had a card issued before 2000. Please try to include only the bigger player. Look forward to your comments.