6 HOF RCs in one year

[JollyElm]

What in high mother effin' heck is XRC??? The "RC" part has gotta be 'Rookie Card,' but 'X'??? Is this some sort of a modern collecting acronym???

[steve B]

Originally Posted by JollyElm

What in high mother effin' heck is XRC??? The "RC" part has gotta be 'Rookie Card,' but 'X'??? Is this some sort of a modern collecting acronym???

X for extended.... Some liked the update sets, and considered them the rookie cards. But then more dealers came along who were just dealers and didn't know cards and often didn't qualify to buy direct from Topps or any of the other companies. They complained (whined) that they couldn't just buy the update sets so they shouldn't count. And regionals shouldn't count, and ......

So Beckett settled on a sort of fake definition, which I've reworded somewhat cynically.

Rookie card- A card issued sort of near the year a player debuted in the league, and was also sold in quantities large enough that every dealer who wanted to could capitalize on the hype.

XRC - A card issued possibly in the players actual first year, but sold to actual businesses, not just guys working out of their garage and the local flea market. OR that were available to any dealer but most of them didn't think the player had potential/had their cash tied up in the football release and didn't buy any.

By 88 it was just silly. Score rookies counted, because there were a ton of them avialable through Toys r Us etc. I forget which year Topps started selling the update set in packs, so they counted after that, while companies that didn't still got the XRC designation.

Going by the logic of "it should only count if everyone could buy it" ...
75 minis were regional, so a 75 Brett is a RC while a 75 mini Brett shouldn't be.
Many areas were serviced by distributors that didn't buy the high numbers. So high numbers were in fact regional and shouldn't count. (but they do!)

To my mind, once the hobby progressed into a somewhat more major hobby the whole RC thing became stupid.
Old days, most kids only collected for 3-4 years, and only the big stars or favorite players survived the wrath of mom. So while Mantle got saved, that kid in Milwaukee (Aaron) probably didn't.
Say around 1977 and people bought hundreds of Joe Charboneau figuring he would become a big star. Since then at least nearly every rookie card has been hoarded and saved in huge qauntities. I would go so far as to say that 89UD Griffeys are more common than any other 89UD card.