Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Rookie Card Designation Added To Card Museums


A designation for Rookie Cards has been added to the cards in the Card Cyber Museum. You can turn on the Rookie Card designation (shown above, along the right border of the card) by going into the 'Change Preferences' page and selecting 'Show' for the Rookie Card Designation preference.

You'll be able to browse a set and see which cards are considered Rookie Cards at a glance.  "Authoritative source(s)" were used to set these designations, but please feel free to direct any corrections to me.  There are conflicts between various sources (and even disagreements as to what constitutes a rookie card), so any backup/links to support corrections would be greatly appreciated.

1 comment :

Dan McAvinchey said...

I had mixed feelings about adding the Rookie Card designation, primarily because of the confusion and differing opinions as to what constitutes a rookie card. You can read an attempt at a definition in "Baseball Card Lingo: So, What is a Rookie Card?" (http://www.bbonly.com/show_pages.php?value=47), and compare it to some of the definitions used in the popular card pricing guides.

An example; when using Beckett's price guide (2004 edition), I couldn't see where they had designated Rich McKinney's 1971 card as a Rookie Card, yet collectors and dealers on eBay promote it as McKinney's Rookie Card. In general, I found much fewer cards than I expected designated as Rookie Cards in the Beckett price guide, especially in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The turnover in the Major Leagues coupled with common sense would seem to suggest that around 10% of the cards on average in a given set would be Rookie Cards using Beckett's own criteria, but it certainly didn't appear to be the case.

Anyone out there that can shed some light on the subject?