Team Issues and Rookie Cards

[Mungo Hungo]

Originally Posted by Leon

+1
I like the term earliest collectible more than I do "card" for some of the items.
While I consider postcards as cards, I agree with Phil, photo packs aren't cards. They are photos (pictures), like it says.

I'm glad to see people say this. I've found it frustrating that over time Beckett and others have gradually expanded their listings to the point where virtually anything depicting a player can show up in their online catalogue or Trading Card Database--even pages from photo albums and yearbooks.

Like everyone else on here, I certainly have no issue with those things being collectibles, but if anything and everything is classified as a card, the term itself has no meaning.

On a more specific note, one of the problems I have with classifying team-issued photos as cards--besides the fact that they are really just photos--is the lack of any inherent restrictions on them being reprinted. Most true cards have identifiers (bios, stats, copyrights, etc.) tying them to a specific year, and the licenses probably are good for only the given year anyway. But team-issued photos generally have no year identifiers--and that's on purpose. The teams can and often do distribute those things over multiple years. In fact, they presumably would have no restriction against reprinting team-issued photos even decades after the fact.