Baseball Hall of Fame Rookie Cards Discussion

[BobC]

Originally Posted by Seven

Almost completely unrelated to the discussion, but I had a healthy chuckle when I saw this part of the post. Couldn't agree more!

Oh, that isn't a made up story, that actually happened and someone actually said that in a different thread on the forum a while back. Modern statisticians, with their modern biases, thinking most all modern players are better than all the older players. They refuse to take into consideration the context and all the other variables when comparing things from era to era in baseball, just like I brought up the thing about having to consider such differences and variables when comparing what is or isn't a rookie card, or even just a card for that matter, from really different eras in the collecting hobby as well.

To truly compare players from different eras, you would have to have a modern player actually born back in the day of an earlier baseball era, and grow up and learn to play in that earlier era, to actually be able to tell if they would have been better than an older era player or not. And the same thing with an older player and having them born today to see how they would turn out with all the modern advantages of science, medicine, equipment, and so on while ending up playing in the games of today. Context is a huge thing, and to my thinking can't be simply defined and measured with some numbers or mathematical formulas. And sort of the same thing with cards and rookie cards. You can't just take the Bowman/Topps/Leaf post 1947 modern era definition of a rookie card being one from a main, nationally distributed set, and simply apply that same definition to everything in the hobby going back to the 1860's. Otherwise, you end up with Babe Ruth's rookie card(s) being from the 1933 Goudey set after all. LOL

So in truth, this isn't completely unrelated to the discussion at all, as it illustrates and shows how thinking and biases from one area, in regards to baseball and the game itself, can be so easily transferred and refocused on another area, such as baseball card collecting.