Quote:
Originally Posted by G1911
I agree the definition was to "grow the hobby". By escalating prices and increasing demand, and it worked. As I specifically said. We don't seem to be saying a different thing here, I just don't think it's good and you do.
Usually, a "card to have" is not the easiest card to get in other areas of the hobby. Wagner is the "card to have" in T206 because it is so rare and a super star. Lajoie is the "card to have" in 1933 Goudey because it is so rare (relatively) and a super star. I don't see why a rookie card is different or why it must be available to everyone, especially for cards issued when not a single person cared about rookie cards because they were not a thing that had been invented, from a collector perspective. I am fully aware it is great from an investor/dealer/business perspective because if it is limited to major Topps cards and the like, it is easier to profit from and drive up if this is so. Which is also why the definition is not very consistently applied.
I wasn't the one who said it was antiquated. I am fully aware that readily available easy to get rookies with hundreds listed at a time on eBay are one of the reasons of "growth of the hobby", by which we seem to mean value increases. I completely understand it from a business side, I don't understand it form a collector side, why I should pay exponentially more for some card that is often not a players first because it's his 'first card some in the general hobby has arbitrarily decided matters'. It's great for dealers, it's great for investors, I personally don't see the appeal as a collector.
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Agree with what you're saying. But to possibly explain this from the collectors side, the surge and growth in the hobby really started and took off in the 80's, fueled by the baby boomers who started collecting as kids about the same time as Bowman and Topps began. So they all had this sunconscious thinking that all normal sets with rookie cards should be just like those early Topps and Bowman sets. Thing is, before Topps and Bowman started up, no card manufacturer/distributor ever really produced cards in an annual and easily identifiable set format, with new and unique images every year, and kept producing new sets covering basically the entire major league, year after year after year. The '33 and '34 Goudey sets are very similar to what Topps and Bowman were doing, especially if they had continued making Goudey sets like those for many more years. Feel that is a big part of why those Goudey sets are so popular today.
So those baby boomer collectors may have subconsciously been defining what sets constituted appropriate ones from which rookie cards could come, based on the Topps and Bowman sets they grew up collecting as kids. And that could be a big part of explaining why so many collectors only considered sets like those Goudey sets to be eligible to have player's rookie card in them.