RARE IS RARE, BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT A ROOKIE CARD!

Well, though I am not surprised, I am still bewildered, maybe even bumfuzzled, as to why people keep making mistakes in describing their items they list for sale on Ebay. I am a Cal Ripken, Jr. fan, so I check out many of his items listed in Ebay on a regular basis. It is a common mistake for a "Rookie Collector" to make the "Rookie Card Distinction Error" but when a "card dealer" makes this same mistake, it is almost always an attempt to mislead their customers in order to build a false value in their product. According to industry / hobby standards, a "Rookie Card" is the first regular edition card of a player. This regular edition refers to the card being available in non-set form, like a wax box. Topps, for many years now, has been making a Topps Traded boxed set of cards. This is an add-on to their regular Topps set, but in a complete set form. The idea was to offer a card of the players who have been traded to another team and rookies who may have been brought up from the minors, so they were not already in the regular set. In these boxed complete sets you know exactly who you are going to get by simply reviewing the checklist. So, since this was like shooting fish in a barrel, when it comes to getting a "Rookie Card", they had the title descriptor of "XRC" for Extra Rookie Card in the price guide. Many of these XRC cards are considered more valuable due to the fact that there were less of them produced than the RC, but this does not make it "the real rookie" as compared to the regular issue, like some would want you to believe in order to get more money from you as a buyer. The only thing we can do colectively as a hobby, is to let others know the difference and to not reward these "con-artists" by buying their items until they correct their blatant error.