Pros vs. Cons of Collecting Pre-War Baseball Rookies

[glchen]

I've thought about this kind of set, and have always liked the idea of it. Rookie cards have always had a special place in baseball card collecting, especially postwar. Prewar is much more difficult for many of the reasons that Phil listed. The biggest thing that would deter me however is the financial costs and the scarcity of available cards. For example, is it even possible to get your hands on a Cy Young rookie card? If you can't get the Ryder Cabinet or the Just So, and instead go to the W600 which is somewhat obtainable, that's 10 years past his rookie, so can you say that you are really collecting rookies at that point?

I'm still debating what to do in these cases, whether to get what rookies you can and for the unobtainable pieces do something else. A couple of other ideas I was thinking instead was to go for a "key" card set for prewar HOFers. The key card idea obviously has leeway also, and players have multiple key cards which people may disagree on. However, for example, for a player like Gehrig, I think most people can agree that his Delong card is a key card while his W517 is not. Another idea, and even more subjective, was to try to collect the "best pose" for prewar HOFers (during playing days of course). That way, you can develop a set of cards that you enjoy looking at rather than some ugly (and very expensive) rookie cards. For example, I think most people agree that Joe Jax rookie (and he's not even a HOFer) isn't his best looking card.