League Leader cards, Team Leader cards, and Rookie Debut Cards or AKA Stuff I Don't Like

EXCLAIMER : THE ABOVE CARD IS NOT A DWIGHT GOODEN CARD.

            But...this is Rickey Henderson card.

Sadly, this is not.

I’ll use someone else to clarify my point.

This is a Bill Madlock card.

This is not.

You can do it with other sports too.

This is a Franco Harris card.

This is not.

Or at least they aren’t to me.

Ah…but what about this?

We’ll get back to that one.

I know a lot of collectors out there feel different about some of the cards I showed above. I see it when people post their PCs online. A collector posts an image or a video of a binder full of Mike Trout cards, inevitably the collection is rife with league-leader cards or team cards that feature Mr. Trout. I see it when people show off cards, they got at card shows. Someone went hog wild at a local show, buying tons of cards of the player they PC and they want to show them off on Twitter, more than likely their haul will include record-breaker cards or team leader/league leader cards of said player.

And that’s fine, I guess.

For them.

Oh and speaking Mike Trout…and Shohei Ohtani for that matter.

This is a Mike Trout card.

This is a Shohei Ohtani card.

This is not.

I’ve just never collected that way. That isn’t to say that I dislike league-leader cards, or other cards of that ilk. I build sets. Those cards are integral to set building. Like base cards, they help tell the story of a season. Hell, thanks to advertising and the infestation of corporate money into broadcast sports, sometimes a card, like say, a World Series card, actually tells me what I missed in a game a fell asleep on.

But this NOT a Max Scherzer card.

I felt this way as a young collector as well. League leader cards, team leader cards, and record-breaker cards of player that I collected; they always felt “other” to me. Maybe because the player was usually sharing the card with a few other league leaders, or the team’s top pitcher that year. I never felt that the card solely belonged to the player. It belonged with a set. The 660 or 792 card set, or a team set that I bought or put together. And because I felt that way, those cards were not going into my PC. I was not collecting them. And I certainly wasn’t trading away a base card of a player, for a league leader card featuring another player.

Modern collecting had become more deceptive though.

Case in point, that Scherzer card I posted above. Modern cards have personalized the universal. A world series card celebrating Max Scherzer’s win in game 7, becomes less about the team effort and more focused on the individual player. That makes it more enticing to say, hey, I’d like to add that card to my Scherzer PC.

But not me buddy.

In 2020, shortly before normal life ended and we were all thrust into this pandemic hell, I got to open up a couple of Hobby boxes of Topps Series 1. Say what you will about Topps 2020 design, I was excited for Series 1. Series 1 marked the first time in my returning to collecting that I would be opening up base product on its day of release. Pete Alonso was the cover boy for Series 1. Pete broke the rookie home run record in 2019. His base card was in Series 1. Topps even had good ol’ Pete at their rip party.

To say that I felt like a part of the zeitgeist would be an understatement.

The first Pete Alonso cards I ripped that year was this one.

And man, I was excited for that card.

Until I noticed that little yellow, slanted bar in the left corner.

That is not a Pete Alonso 2020 card.

This is a Pete Alonso 2020 card.

I sort of collect Pete Alonso cards.

Hence my excitement.

That league-leader card is not in my collection.

Though it is a sharp looking card.

But you can see where a guy like me would be deceived. It looks like a Pete Alonso card. It’s just Pete on the front. There’s no little box also featuring Eugenio Suarez and Cody Bellinger, the second and third league leader in home runs. Pete’s name is on the card, just like his base. The Mets team name and logo feature prominently on the card as well. Old league-leader cards never had the logos for the teams on the front or back of the card.

It’s almost like Topps wants me to put that card in my Pete Alonso collection.

Nice try, Topps.

It looks nice in the set though.

But seriously....

Also...this card is awesome.

But guess what?

Okay...I'll stop.

Sticking with Mr. Alonso, this brings me to another thing I don’t like: the proliferation of rookie cards. Pete Alonso was big news in 2019, what, with breaking the rookie home run record and all. And Topps wanted you to know how big Pete was. They gave him a rookie card in Series 2. And a rookie debut card in 2020 update. And an all-star card bearing the RC symbol. And a home run derby card, also bearing the RC symbol. Pete Alonso had four rookie cards in base/update Topps sets alone in 2020.

I suppose if they did league-leader cards in Update, Pete would’ve had a RC symbol stamped on that too.

And I’m not even going to get into the number of rookie cards in other releases.

A lot of collectors like rookie cards. I get that. I came of age in and era of collecting where rookie cards became the rage. 1984 Donruss Don Mattingly anyone? And with every yearly release we all salivated over that year’s rookie cards. Yeah, I hoarded my share of Danny Tartabull cards. But this madness in modern collecting? Four rookie cards? I don’t even want to get into the excess of Home Run Derby cards, and trying to fill up a 300-card set so that the cost of a Hobby box feels somewhat justified. But four rookie cards?

The 1987 base Danny Tartabull is a sweet card by the way.

The most egregious of these rookie card to me, is the Rookie Debut card. I don’t like the Rookie Debut card. It’s superfluous at best. I guess I can understand the Home Run Derby card, and I can certainly understand an All-star card. But a card celebrating someone’s first game? And not EVERYONE someone. Just certain, select someones. Rookie Debut cards just seem like Topps taking another stab at giving a player a rookie card. And because Rookie Updates exist in Update Series, they seem like filler as well.

A part of me wishes Update sets still looked like this.

Forgive me I’m an old man.

But, yes, I do put the Rookie Debut cards in with players I PC.

And it burns me when a Rookie Debut card looks better than the actual rookie card.

Hey, remember that Franco Harris Instant Replay card?

This one?

Okay, here’s where I may sound like a hypocrite to some. I consider cards like Franco’s Instant Replay card to be legit single-player cards. I say the same thing for the individual All-Star card. My reasoning is simple. The All-Star card or the occasional Instant Replay card are representative of one player. Slapping Pete Alonso on a league-leader card and trying to make it look like a card of his own is not the same thing.

Eddie Murrary makes All-Star cards badass.

That said, I’m showing my age here. When I was a kid, and because we didn’t get four or five individual cards (or rookie cards) of a player, having an All-Star card of someone you collected was pretty special. Action cards, at least in the 1970s, served a purpose. It was a way for Topps to show off motion photography, which was relatively new come, say, 1971. Having a 1972 Roberto Clemente In-Action card, or a 1972 Terry Bradshaw Pro-Action card was pretty sweet.

Though I’m not sure what the thought process was for Topps by 1982.

Action cards were plentiful by then.

That is to say, those cards feel more player oriented to me than having a favorite player on a card with two or three other guys. And, I guess, like Rookie Debut cards, those old Action cards made it easier to afford a card of a player I wanted to collect. In cases of players like Dan Marino in 1984 Topps Football, his Instant Replay card was the Rookie Debut card of its day.

Of it is now because of the difference in cost between the two.

And maybe that is the point of someone putting league leader cards, or Rookie Debut cards into their PC of a player. Cost. Collectors want something representative of a player they like, and cards of that ilk are often affordable. They make it easier to round out a PC. Give it some weight. Some prominence. If nothing else, a reason to justify buying a three-inch binder and all of those sheets for one or two guys.

It's just not my cup of tea.

And as we know in collecting…that’s okay.

Now I’m going to go and burn all of those unnecessary Rookie Debut cards.

But one last thing....

Rookie Short Prints burn me too.

Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!

 

NEXT FRIDAY: The complexities of collecting Ben Roethlisberger cards.