I've never really cared about rookie cards either, maybe because I'm old enough to remember that when I started collecting in the 1970s, the concept of a "rookie card" didn't really exist, or at least wasn't a term than anybody used or cared about. The card that popularized the term around 1980 and the years immediately after was the 1952 Topps Mantle, ironically not his actual rookie card by nearly any modern definition. I remember hearing the term for the first time around then and thinking it sounded kind of strange, like an artificial construct somebody came up with to create demand.
From Dave Jamieson's "Mint Condition":
"As more card sets and hobby publications poured into drugstores and card shops, a new term emerged among schoolboys: "rookie card". In years past, collectors had never made much of a fuss over whether a particular card was the player's first to appear. Things changed in the early '80s after Mickey Mantle's 1952 Topps rookie card sold for around $3000, then a staggering sum for a postward piece of cardboard. Such sales marked the beginning of a long nostalgia boom, as the boys who'd collected those early Topps sets grew into professionals with incomes to throw around."
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