Great Player / Bad Rookie Card

In a recent weekly mailbag at my favorite sports-related website, someone asked the writer which great band had the worst name. (my personal fave would be Silversun Pickups) Let's see if I can apply that to sports cards. 

Over the years I've made a few wishlists of legendary players and / or personal faves. In most cases I'd target a player's rookie card, particularly if they played after 1981. If money were no object I could hoard PSA 10 copies of Hall of Fame stars to my heart's content. But there are some legends with RCs that just aren't appealing at any price. 

Here's a handful of HOFers with affordable (under $200) first cards that I'll probably never own, and why:

1996-97 NBA rookies

The 1996 NBA draft class is one of the greatest in my lifetime, rivaled only by 1984 and 2003. No basketball card collection would be complete without a Kobe Bryant RC and I used to have a PSA-graded copy of his SP single. Unfortunately rookies in that set are plain compared to other '96-97 issues. 

Kobe's top rookie cards are well over $200 - Topps Chrome and Finest (Gold). What's worse, they're prone to "greening", an unavoidable plague that discolors certain Finest and Chrome sets regardless of how well-protected they are. 

That alone is a reason why I avoid shopping for any player in this draft class - even PC stars like Steve Nash and Ray Allen. Allen Iverson is in these sets as well. (this copy screams "I'm melting!!")

It's a shame, the first Chrome basketball set would be a classic without that awful color bleed.
 

Tim Duncan 1997-98 Topps Chrome

Most Tim Duncan rookie cards are super affordable - $5 each or so. The one that isn't, Topps Chrome, is just as prone to greening as the previous year's set. Years ago, I picked up a Chauncey Billups RC from this set and tried to hide it behind another card in a top loader to keep it from greening. Didn't work. 

I wish I could fill that ten-year gap in my hoops legends collection between Shaq and LeBron, but Topps' tekchrome goo makes that a nearly impossible task.
 

Barry Sanders 1989 Score

1989 Score has a dozen rookie cards of Hall of Fame players, but only those who played during the 1988 season got action shots. That year's draft picks got this high school yearbook-looking shit. Which is a shame for fans of Troy Aikman, Deion Sanders, Derrick Thomas, and Barry Sanders. I have a Deion and a Derrick in my collection, but those were under $10 apiece. On aesthetics alone, I'd be reluctant to pay much more than $10 for Barry, even though he was my favorite running back of the '90s and the second-best rusher of the Super Bowl era.
 

If the Sanders Score RC looked like this, I'd have picked up a PSA-graded copy years ago.

Earl Campbell has a plain looking rookie card, too. But Topps didn't have licensing rights for NFL team logos until 1982, so anyone who wasn't a Brown or a Ram would have a similar-looking card. And Joe Montana's rookie card hides the lack of logos just well enough that it's a nicer looking RC than Sanders', which is why I tried to narrow this list to cards released after '81.
 

Hockey rookie cards

I've got to give Upper Deck credit. There aren't many modern hockey greats with lousy looking rookie cards. One that immediately comes to mind is the Brett Hull Topps/OPC rookie card, which predates UD's entry into the NHL market. I can't count this card as one I'll never own since I needed it to complete my set, but a legendary goal scorer like the "Golden Brett" deserved a decent looking RC.
 

That's better

So which hockey Hall of Famer has a (fairly attainable) rookie card that will likely never enter my PC? Here are some contenders:

A rare miss for Upper Deck here as Penguins defenseman Kris Letang gets the Barry Sanders treatment. He's still active and not quite a Hall of Fame lock, but he'll probably get in. Also, this isn't his best RC;  his SP Authentic Future Watch auto is well over $100 and not at all a necessity for my hockey card collection. 

Patrick Marleau should be a Hall of Famer, but so far the HHOF committee has greeted him thusly:

I'd rather have his junior hockey card anyhow. Squint at it and you can almost picture Patty in a Hartford Whalers jersey.
 

Besides Brett Hull, the one actual Hall of Famer with a subpar rookie card is Dale Hawerchuk. 

1982-83 O-Pee-Chee has a nice, clean design. Unfortunately early '80s OPC issues have centering issues galore, and many of them are rough cut. The two other Hall of Famers with RCs in this set - Joe Mullen and Ron Francis - got nice action shots while Winnipeg's rookie centers Hawerchuk and Thomas Steen got cruddy closeups. 

Steen isn't a Hall of Famer, but I could make a One Page PC out of his other '80s issues.  

I had to research that a little bit, and if I did any digging on baseball greats with bland rookie cards I could probably come up with a few. But one star slugger immediately came to mind without looking:

David Arias (Ortiz)

I have over 300 different David Ortiz cards. (I used to keep track on TCDB but that site is a shitshow.) Not one of them is a rookie card. Why don't I own a copy of one of my all-time favorite player's first cards? Well, let's take a look at my options:

I loathe 1997 Fleer. In my opinion, it's as bad as the 1991 edition - and worse than 1995. The cardstock is needlessly flimsy and every base card looks like it was printed from a cheap Compaq or something. The Tiffany/Crystal parallels are pretty sharp, but that just infuriates me even more because that should have been the base design. It was 1997 ffs, not 1987!) 

'97 Fleer Ultra is... fine. I'd probably have a copy of Big Papi's RC if it were $10. Maybe $20. But it's still an average looking card in a very run-of-the-mill, not at all rare or high-end set. It shouldn't cost more than a Jackson. And yet this nondescript single sells for up to $80! 

Instead of those, I picked up a minor league issue for under $15 and called it good. It's not an official RC but I got to rep my home state and save some cash, with an equal or better quality card. 

Can you think of any great players with not-so-great looking rookie cards?

Thanks for reading!



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