Posted By:
Eric BrehmI remember that Jim Beckett and Dennis Eckes, in the introduction to the 7th edition of "The Sport Americana Baseball Card Price Guide" (1986), said "the insipid rookie card phenomenon is still with us," and "the bubble has yet to burst." So they certainly weren't promoting rookie card collecting at the time, in fact they were a bit negative on it. [Insipid = "lacking in qualities that interest, stimulate, or challenge."] However I would guess those comments probably can be attributed to Denny Eckes, Beckett's co-author for the price guides of that period, rather than Jim Beckett himself. In any case, I guess the rookie card bubble never did burst.
Beckett and Eckes also said back then "there is no such thing as an EX-MT individual card. A card is either Mint or not Mint." At that time, according to their grading standards, the highest grade a card could be, if it was not Mint, was Excellent. But it soon became apparent to collectors that there were many cards that more than met the requirements for Excellent, but yet couldn't be called Mint. So all the intermediate grades EX-MT, Near Mint, Near Mint Plus, Near Mint to Mint, and so on came into common usage. This was important since so many of the cards sought by collectors, especially the post war material, fell into the Excellent to Mint range. These intermediate grades of course eventually became a part of the numerical grading systems in use today, where an Excellent card only gets a 5 on the scale of 1 to 10 (or with SGC, a 60 on the scale of 10 to 100).