cards of great historical figures

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by wdmullins

Rookie cards make (a little) sense in the sports card hobby. In non-sports, it's silly.

Why? Why for example isn't Michael Jackson's first card as significant as Mike Trout's, relatively speaking?

[wdmullins]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Why? Why for example isn't Michael Jackson's first card as significant as Mike Trout's, relatively speaking?

For several reasons -

1. Athletes have well-defined rookie seasons, and in general, the people pictured on non-sports cards do not. (When was Neil Armstrong's rookie year -- 1969, when he landed on the moon? 1966, when he flew his Gemini mission? In 1955, when he became a test pilot? 1949, when he joined the Navy?)

2. While sports cards have rookie cards defined separately from first cards (usually based on the differences between playing in major and minor leagues), the distinction is lost in non-sports cards.

3. In sports, a rookie card generally means a card issued in association with a player's rookie season, but not in non-sports (else John Milton's "rookie card" would be well over 300 years old). Michael Jackson first sang professionally in 1964 (as part of the Jackson 5), and as a solo in 1971. His first foreign card seems to have been in 1971 (as part of the J5), his first solo card was 1972 (also foreign), and his first US, solo card would have been from his 1984 Topps set. Which of these most corresponds to what is accepted as a sports rookie card? I'd say the 1984 Topps, but it's either 20 or 13 years too late to be a "rookie" card.

4. To people who've collected non-sports for a long time, the whole idea of a non-sports rookie card appears to be an attempt by sports card speculators to identify and hype non-sport cards as being more valuable than they otherwise would be, given that their intrinsic scarcity and value isn't any greater than any other card from the same set.

5. And often, people who identify a particular card as a non-sports celebrity's "rookie" card are simply ignorant and wrong when they do so (and I'm not accusing anyone in this thread, btw) -- I recently informed someone who was calling an Impel Terminator 2 card Arnold Schwarzenegger's rookie card that they were a year late -- he had appeared in the previous year on cards in Pacific's Totall Recall set.

Anyone who says a particular card is a celebrity's first card is making a statement of fact. Calling it a "rookie" card, though, is just putting a label on the card that it usually doesn't deserve, with the connotation that it has a value associated with it that the market may or may not bear out.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by wdmullins

For several reasons -

4. To people who've collected non-sports for a long time, the whole idea of a non-sports rookie card appears to be an attempt by sports card speculators to identify and hype non-sport cards as being more valuable than they otherwise would be, given that their intrinsic scarcity and value isn't any greater than any other card from the same set.

This is exactly what it was in sports too; a speculative hype train started by those who stood to profit if people bought in on the sales pitch, and here we are with everyone on that train and chugging full steam ahead. I've never really 'understood' the rookie craze, but when one of my Discord groups is busy hyping a Trout rookie, it somehow seems less strange to me than when they're trying to hype Boba Fett's rookie card. Athletes, non-sports, I understand 'first card' appeal (which is different from rookie, with the loose and usually inconsistent rookie rules that seem to exist almost solely to exclude any card that isn't easy to get because it would be difficult to profit as easily on). First card makes sense to me. I don't get first card appeal for fictional characters in non-sports land. I get wanting the first card of a favored baseball player (which is rarely their "rookie" that is hyped for $$$$) or an actor or a historical figure (Good luck there identifying anonymous CDV's...) one admires or collects.

[wdmullins]

Originally Posted by G1911

This is exactly what it was in sports too; a speculative hype train started by those who stood to profit if people bought in on the sales pitch,

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.

[G1911]

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.

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.

[wdmullins]

Although I used a 1963 Rose as an example, the period I was thinking of was ca. 1979. I worked at a comic shop in Nashville then, and we sold baseball cards as well. That was the time when we first started seeing reference to "rookie" cards in the press (as it was), in guides, and started to mark such cards as "rookies" on stickers. This period - the late 1970s, when it was a Topps-only world, and before Donruss and Fleer came along -- was when rookie cards became the hypable thing they are today.

[G1911]

Originally Posted by wdmullins

Although I used a 1963 Rose as an example, the period I was thinking of was ca. 1979. I worked at a comic shop in Nashville then, and we sold baseball cards as well. That was the time when we first started seeing reference to "rookie" cards in the press (as it was), in guides, and started to mark such cards as "rookies" on stickers. This period - the late 1970s, when it was a Topps-only world, and before Donruss and Fleer came along -- was when rookie cards became the hypable thing they are today.

Okay. We'll move it from 1981 to 1979. Doesn't change anything. Topps was NOT the only game in town. They were the only huge manufacturer with an annual MLB wide release, but a ton of the 1956-1980 players have first cards outside of the Topps orbit. They appear in regional issues, in team issues, in a host of other sets that you will find in the standard catalog. I don't think there is anything to debate here...