What Do You Consider Mickey Mantle's RC?

[4815162342]

I haven't read a Beckett in years, but remember the term "XRC" being applied to the "real" but unpopular rookie cards, while the cards that popularly known as rookies would be labeled "RC". Ridiculous! The first card of a player is the rookie card and nothing else.

[steve B]

Yeah, XRC was used for rookie cards from traded sets. That was a bit of a compromise after they said rookie cards had to be from a "major nationally distributed set" Which was put in the defenition to exclude draft pick and highschool all star sets. Jeter was in a couple of those, and was probably one of the main drivers for the change. After all, the highschool all star set only had a print run of something like 5000, not nearly enough for all the dealers at the time to get in on the action.

And with McGwire they had a different problem, a card in a major set that wasn't actually a major league card. I think that's about the time the FTC- first Topps card designation came along.

The whole "rookie card" thing actually made sense up till roughly the late 1970's. after that it got sillier and sillier.

Steve B