Baseball Hall of Fame Rookie Cards Discussion

[BobC]

Originally Posted by bcbgcbrcb

I would stick with all of the foreign issues that I listed previously being rookie card candidates. In mostly all cases, the teams that they appear on for those cards are “major league” for that particular country. Very few of us have enough expertise to determine those that are not “major league”. Besides that, the alternative would be that we count the 1974/1978 Laughlin Old Time Black Stars cards as rookies for just about every Negro Leaguer that had a card issued. This would make all of these rookie cards issued between 30-60 after the player retired. Not a whole lot of fun to collect those if you ask me. Sometimes common sense wins out over a technicality.

Well, that raises another interesting question, especially when talking about HOFers. Would Cooperstown ever allow. let alone consider, a player that only played in what you are terming as a foreign "major league level" league to be able to get into the Cooperstown HOF as an inductee then? I'm pretty sure the answer is a resounding - NO! And also, MLB and SABR and other US baseball related and affiliated organizations do not ever consider any such foreign leagues as "major league level" either, to my knowledge. Think about it, if they ever did, Ichiro would be the all-time hits leader in baseball history, and Sadaharu Oh would be up on the top of Mt. Rushmore for home run hitters, way ahead of everyone else. But neither of them is. So, if apparently no one or no organization part of or involved in any way with the hierarchy of U.S. major league baseball will ever consider such foreign leagues as on a "major league level", why would/should anyone else think that way for purposes of determining a player's "major league" rookie card? It kind of doesn't make any logical sense, does it?

But again, people can think what they want, and to me, there are no or right wrong answers. Just differing opinions.