Quote:
Originally Posted by Balticfox
So what? The "1948" Leaf cards of Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige are still the same cards that they ever were. They're no less or more attractive than they were yesterday. This whole rookie card thing arose from dealers hyping up their oldest cards to sucker dilettantes and greenhorns into paying higher prices. "Oh, but it's his rookie card so it's worth five times as much as his card from the following year!" Yeah, well you can keep it then. Or sell it to some pigeon.
Yes, precisely! 'Nuff said.
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For a while there was some validity to most rookie cards being worth more.
And it was all about the survival rate of those cards.
Kids typically collected as kids for maybe 3-4 years. Yes, there were outliers like me and probably a bunch of others here who never really stopped.
And the occasional purge of "stuff" by mom was a thing. Sometimes a favorite card or two would be saved, but most got thrown away or given away.
So for example, a kid gets a 54 Aaron. Bit loses interest in cards a bit into 55. By spring cleaning 56, he's not really interested. Maybe isn't a Braves fan, and probably not a fan of then kid who hit a decent number of home runs but isn't flashy like Mays or Mantle and who knows if he will get any better?
So the favorite player and maybe a few stars get saved, but the Aaron rookie goes in the bin with the rest of the cards.
So they were less common.
By the late 70's, that was less of a thing. The hobby was more advanced and popular. Not that kids collected longer, but the Rookie card thing had been established. So they got saved more often than not.
By the junk wax era - yeah, it was nothing buy hype. And Beckett for better or worse promoted guidelines that said local issues couldn't be rookie cards. They had to be major nationally issued sets.
I would say that for most sets since the mid 70's the rookie cards are more common than all but a few stars. But not by much.
It's sort of silly for prewar cards, and even late 40's cards.
A few other things influence it, mostly that people have a bit of a fascination with "firsts" . Sort of like a first edition of a book, or a card of someone who was the first to do something.