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Marc S.Chris - you can define rookie any way you want. However, the larger baseball collecting community tends to define rookie as in first card from the major leagues.
Use your own logic - why does MLB have a "Rookie of the Year" if the winner has already been a professional baseball player for many years?
At the end of the day, with pre-war cards, minor league examples are typically not considered the so-called "Rookie" card. Yes, there are sometimes exceptions, and first-cards of major HOF'ers are always very popular. But the rookie card tends to be the first major-league depiction of that player in a series of cards that was widely distributed.