The Rookie Craze
The story behind a bizarre baseball card phenomenon
The Rookie Craze
You know what doesn’t make sense?
The craze over rookie cards.
There’s nothing particularly special or interesting about a player’s first baseball card. Baseball cards (not game pieces, but the traditional bubble gum cards) are really impractical, after all. You can’t really do anything with them, other than display them and hope that nobody steals them.
There’s no intrinsic reason why baseball cards should be worth anything. It’s like artwork in that sense.
And there’s certainly no reason why a rookie card should be worth more than any other card.
So where does the trend come from?
All signs point to the early and mid 1980s.
In fact, this dated Net54 thread is pretty good evidence of where the trend started. A few excerpts from posters:
This matches the account in Card Sharks of the phenomenon (apologies for the poor quality):
Now, if we take a look at the newspaper articles that mention rookie cards in 1981, we can see that there was a bit of a snowball effect. People became excited about the first cards of exciting rookie players because others were mentioning certain rookie cards that had suddenly shot up in value:
Now, if you look closely, you’ll notice that the excitement and nostalgia for these cards is all linked to one thing: price.
And, as you may have noticed, there’s one “rookie” card that had everyone’s attention: the infamous 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle.
Never mind the fact, of course, that Mantle’s true rookie card was the 1951 Bowman issue. The 1952 Topps Mantle was scarce (thanks to cases of unopened product being dumped into the sea), the player was legendary, and the hype around this card was quite real.
And so the rookie card craze was born. Never mind how many cards each company was churning out from year to year. Rookies were treated as something special — and still are today.
And so, in truth, articles like this represented what actually was the future of the Hobby:
I was always impressed with the rookie cards during the 60s and 70s with the little trophies on the front even if I had never heard of the player. I even remember being disappointed when Topps changed the trophy from the ball player to the bowl trophy style. Maybe 1974 or so. Topps did a nice job promoting rookies and even had an rookie team all-star dinner annually to promote them.
It's funny.. in late 1973, I was still missing about 20 cards from that season's set. I ordered them from Larry Fritsch in Wisconsin, who advertised in magazines like Baseball Digest at the time. One of those cards was the Mike Schmidt/Ron Cey rookie (Topps #615). I probably paid 5 cents for it, just like the rest of my missing cards. A couple of years later - likely around 1978 or '79, but certainly before 1981 - I was in a bookstore thumbing through a now long-forgotten guide which priced baseball cards from previous decades (probably dating back to the '52 Topps set). The Schmidt/Cey rookie was listed in that book as easily being the most expensive card in the 1973 set. I remember the moment well, because I was thinking how lucky I was to have ordered the card from Larry Fritsch for only a nickel. But the bookstore is also memorable for me.. and I had moved away from that city by 1980. My point being that *someone* who helped put together that price guide was already aware of rookie card 'value' a couple of years before 1981.