For 3500, which Jackie would be your one/only?

[Gorditadogg]

Originally Posted by darwinbulldog

The only sense in which one of Jackie's 1947 cards should be disqualified from rookie card status is if you want to argue that his rookie year was actually 1945 and therefore, if your definition of rookie card requires it to have been issued during the player's rookie season, he doesn't actually have a rookie card. In any case, he did win Rookie of the Year in 1947, so you have that going for you if you're in the his-rookie-cards-are-the-1947-Bond-Bread-cards camp. But anyone who's trying to argue that something from 1949 is his rookie card is just factually incorrect. We're all entitled to our opinions, but we're not entitled to our facts. You could have 8 billion people firmly believing that Mickey Mantle had a rookie card issued in 1952, and their belief itself might be a notable fact, but they'd still be wrong.

Jackie Robinson played in the Majors in 1947, and he had baseball cards in 1947. There could be zero or a billion surviving copies of those cards today, but in neither case would it have any bearing on what his rookie cards were. Whether or not it is a baseball card at all is, as ever, a function of its physical characteristics. Distributing an object in a larger number of regions does not magically convert it into a baseball card. It could have been issued in 1 city or 3 countries or 5 continents or 7 planets. A 1956 Topps Hank Aaron is no more a baseball card than a 1947 Bond Bread Jackie Robinson is.

It is fact that the BobC's definition of a Rookie Card is accepted by most of the hobby. It's your opinion that this "official definition" should be rejected, for the (obvious) reasons you noted.