Rookie Saturation - One More

A little add-on to my last post, or encore, if you will.  Keeping it short so I can go root for Fuji's Sharks to close out the Avalanche and advance to round 3 against the Blues.  Going to be tough to decide who I like there...but I digress.

Here is the complete count graph of all Topps sets from 1955 to 2018.  It's a combination of Topps flagship and Topps Update/Rookie & Traded etc. sets.  The blue line is physical cards produced each year.  The orange line is total players depicted on those cards.  There are many years where these two are the same number.

You'll probably have to click on the chart to see it very well since it's so long.

But what you can tell is that while the number of rookie cards fluctuates between seasons, the trend isn't really an incline one way or the other.  Rather, it's just kinda up and down around the 100 count mark (highlighted in yellow).

If you shave the peaks and low valleys, you can see a general flat-ish trend.  The actual range is something like 60-100 cards, or 100-150 players, and only falls outside of that a couple times over the 63 year span.  When I started this little study, I expected the left end to start around a few dozen and the right side be way up off the chart, but that isn't what happened.

Anyway, other suggestions for different analysis of this data (or any other, really) is welcome in the comments.