How To: Gaming
THE HOW TO CO. — EDITION 10
How To: Gaming
THE HOW TO CO. — EDITION 10
One player, a queue of first cards, and a hobby that has never agreed on which of them counts. Topps draws its line at the Major League debut — cards issued after it can carry the RC designation, cards issued before it cannot. That single rule sorts the pile in seconds. Then it leaves you standing in front of dozens of cards on the right side of the line with no way to choose between them.
“Half the binders I have been handed had a prospect card sitting in the rookie slot. Nobody was lying to me. They had just never checked which side of the debut it fell on.”
That is the easy half of the problem, and it has a fixed answer: one date, checked once, sorts a binder. The hard half starts on the other side of that date, where the cards are all eligible and the word still has to land on exactly one of them.
READ: HOW TO KNOW WHAT YOUR BINDER IS ACTUALLY WORTH →
There is no agreed rule for what counts as a true rookie card. Beckett — a grader and a price guide, not a message board — ran a reader poll on it, and the poll offered three competing definitions. Those three are below, in the poll’s terms rather than the hobby’s: none of them is settled language, and none of them has the standing to retire the other two.
The earliest thing in the queue. Amateur and prospect issues count.
Amateur cards drop out. Prospect cards in a pro uniform stay in.
Inserts drop out as well. The narrowest of the three.
The three do not select the same card. That is not a gap in your knowledge — it is a gap in the hobby’s, and the useful thing to do with it is to find out which definition the person across the table is using before either of you says the word.
Two things worth carrying about the RC mark. The first is that it is baseball’s. It does not transfer to basketball or football, and treating it as a league-wide convention will get you into trouble in either. The second is that its origin is thinner than the way people repeat it: the hobby’s own account is that a single cross-brand logo was standardised for the 2006 season, and we have not found a primary document from the league or the players’ union that says so. Treat 2006 as the received date rather than a proven one.
Read it in order and the rule states itself. Topps’ own definition is that a player’s rookie cards are the first cards issued once they have made their Major League debut, and that they carry a designation such as “RC”. Everything the magenta rule cuts off belongs to someone who had not debuted yet. Those cards can be older, scarcer and far harder to find. By that definition they are still not rookie cards.
What the line does not do is narrow the field to one. Topps says plainly that a player can have dozens of rookie cards. That is the run sitting past the magenta rule above — four drawn solid, the rest fading off the end, all clearing the same bar on the same day. Which is where the trouble starts, because the hobby then has to pick one out of that run, and it has never agreed how. Nothing in the drawing closes that run off, either, and that is deliberate: the rule says where a player’s first cards start and says nothing whatever about where they stop.
The card on the wrong side of the line is not a mistake either. A 1st Bowman card is a player’s first official baseball card and it is released before their official rookie card. Topps first used the designation in 1996, made it a staple of the product from 2003, and says in its own glossary that its importance has come to rival the rookie card’s. So the queue carries a card on each side of the debut, and both of them have a serious claim on the word.
The middle frame is the entire problem. Nothing in it is disqualified and nothing in it is singled out — every card there clears the same bar on the same date.
