Quote:
Originally Posted by wdmullins
Eeh, maybe not so much when "rookie" cards first became a thing in sports cards. At that time, there was Topps. And that's it. There was no problem identifying Pete Rose's 1963 card as his rookie card, as there were no other cards that it could possibly be. There were no chase subsets, no parallels, nothing else to speak of. You simply identified the first card that a player appeared on, and 90%+ of the time, it was by default the rookie card.
All the hyping of one card over another came later, in the 1980s, as the number of cards proliferated.
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In 1963 no one gave a darn about rookies at all and they weren’t special. The rookie as a special item is an invention of the early 80’s dealers. Since we are talking about collecting rookies specifically, not that they existed (of course players have had first cards or what we calla rookie now for the entirety of card history), that is the context used. There was not only Topps, many, even if most significant post war players first cards are absolutely not Topps; it’s just the Topps card that is branded the rookie.