[seanofjapan]

Reading this makes me wonder why the hobby doesn't have a term that designates a player's best or most desirable card, regardless of whether it is a rookie card (by whatever definition) or not. Like their "Key Card" or something, (only to designate the player's most sought after card rather than the most sought after card in a given set).

Like obviously Mantle's 52 Topps card is his key card even though it isn't his rookie. But there are lots of other examples of players whose best cards (here we can use market value as a proxy for "best", though that is also a debatable usage) aren't their rookies. Everyone knows which ones they are, yet we don't have a commonly shared word to describe that. Which seems strange to me.

I raise this because most of this debate on what constitutes a true "rookie card" seems to focus on relatively arbitrary points (whether a guy had played an MLB game yet at the time the card came out, how widespread the set was distributed, etc) which don't really seem to affect the value of the card to collectors much. Does anybody care that Carl Yastrzemski hadn't played in MLB yet when his 1960 Topps card came out? No, or at least not enough to affect the desirability of that card.

Looking back on how Beckett used to develop various terms to describe things that weren't quite rookie cards back in the 80s, it always struck me that their main reason for doing so was to somehow recognize key cards which were problematic to describe as rookie cards, which illustrates the problem. Like when they used to put "FTC" after "First Topps cards" it was obvious they were just doing that to accomodate the 52 Mantle (and then having invented the term applied it to every other FTC that came along even though nobody really cared). Same with "XRC" for cards in the update sets, only their purpose there was to maintain the "RC" designation for the regular cards in the following year's sets.