Joe DiMaggio's Rookie Card?

[PolarBear]

Originally Posted by darwinbulldog

1. How big is a card? Are T206s too small to be considered baseball cards? What about E254s? Are T3s too large? Exhibits?

2. Fine. Most people tacitly (if not explicitly) reject this in not accepting that Derek Jeter's rookie cards are, by this definition, from 1995 or 1996.

3. Would you say that there is no such thing as a Canadian baseball card or that there are Canadian baseball cards but none of them are rookie cards?

4. Can there be more than one player in the picture if there's only one player named on the card (e.g., see below)?

My personal definition of "card sized" would fit into a standard PSA/SGC slab, so yes T206 etc. are cards. I never really thought about it before but I think they need to be square/rectangle. I personally wouldn't consider E254's "cards" by that definition.

Of course there are Canadian baseball cards. I just wouldn't consider them a true "rookie". How far do we want to go beyond that? It's easy to include Canada since they have a baseball tradition and the cards are in English. What if Japan issued a "rookie"? Most people wouldn't count it. As I said, these are the lines I draw, which I expect most people will disagree.

I'd consider cards with a single named player, who is the main subject, to be cards of that player. Plenty of modern action shot cards are obviously meant to be for that player even though others may be in the shot. (1973 Topps is pretty bad about this though and sometimes you can't tell what player they were trying to shoot)

For what it's worth, I don't buy into all the "rookie" hype or "most desirable" hype anyway. Like I said up thread, if I wanted a DiMaggio, I'd get one of the Play Ball issues instead of anything from 36-38. I just don't care about "rookie" cards.