Rookie Card Saturation ... Fact Or Fiction?

As I've said many times before, I'm an old-school collector.  I don't really care or prioritize rookie cards in my cardboard pursuits.  When I started in the 80's, the most visible rookie cards were multi-player issues that I put at the end of team sets.  A lot of them were even numbered to show up in the end of sets too.  These days, rookies are the most popular and sought after things that the producers make and market.  It seems like most products are made to promote them, whether the player shown is the new phenom who is playing at the big league level, or the future prospect.  Either way, at least to me, the card market is all about the rookie player.

Sometimes I feel like the hobby is one big propaganda machine geared to force everyone to believe that rookies are the only worthwhile cards to collect.

I have been under the impression that the flagship sets issued in the last several years have been more saturated with rookie cards than ever.  Since the RC logo was developed in 2006, rookie cards have been more visible.  But I still thought that they put more younger players into the most recent sets compared to years past. And that Bowman became the most rookie-centric product of all, so the numbers of Bowman rookies must be huge. 

But is this really true?

I decided to go through and chart out the number of rookie cards issued in the major flaship sets.  Topps, of course was the only manufacturer until 1981, and then Donruss and Fleer joined.  Bowman (a sub-label of Topps) and Upper Deck appeared around 1989.  Then the other companies came and went a couple times and now we're basically left with Topps and Bowman again.  Topps issued Traded or Update sets under various names for most years.  The point of those being to catch up with more new rookies as well as the players that changed teams.  The Fleer name appeared under Fleer Tradition in the late 90's as well, and also issued some update sets.

So let's look at the numbers.  I went through the Trading Card Database and looked at the section on each set lableled Rookies.  Lucky for me, they already did most of the leg work.  Each Rookie list has all the cards issued for that set that qualify as rookie cards.  And they post a count above each list.  Now, any variations would add to that count, so I had to be on the lookout for those (I may have missed a few).  It also includes manager rookies, but they aren't in such significant numbers to make the counts much different.

I'm going to show these in reverse order, starting with the most recent years.  As you can see, the Topps numbers have been the largest for the last decade plus, especially in the Update set.  The biggest spike is 2015, with Topps issuing 179 rookie cards (with 192 different players depicted).  The little black numbers are the total player counts which take into account multi-player cards in Update.
Bowman, on the other hand, only puts about 30 rookie cards in it's flagship set, which is smaller than Topps.  I checked to see if Chrome or Draft Picks & Prospects had way more, but they really didn't.  You can see in 2012 that the counts for those two only nearly matched (not surpassing) flagship Topps.   The one glitch in this chart is that the database had no RC's designated for Donruss products from 2015-2017.  I'm not sure if that really means there aren't any, or they just didn't get listed on the site.

The graph shows it better.  except for spikes in 2006 by UD, and 2015 by Topps Update, the numbers have been fairly consistent.  No steady increase from left to right like I figured.

I suppose there is some effect from the number and quality of the actual rookie classes from year to year, but I don't know what the trends would be.  I'll just stick with counting cards.

OK, so lets look at the previous decades.  More companies and more cards, right?

So there are some differences.  Topps averaged in the 60's for the recent years, and now they drop to the 30's or 40's except for a few bigger numbers early.  The "Total Players" line is again, the total number of players depicted on the counted cards in Update.  From 1992 til 2001, there were a lot of 2-, 3-, and 4-player rookie cards put into those Update or Traded sets.  This makes a difference especially when you look at 1994 for example.  Topps created 66 cards with rookies on them, but there were 109 players on those 66 cards.

The most glaring part of this chart (not only because I highlighted the overall high - and low - numbers in yellow) is the Bowman numbers.  Peaking at an overall high of 202 in '93, Bowman's numbers blew up after their first year, and then cooled a bit until 2002.  There is your evidence that Bowman is the rookie-centric product, though I though it continued until now.  For some reason, it stopped dead after 2005.  Bowman went from 162 RC's to a stunning 10.  That may be because of the RC logo regulations, I'm not sure.

Click on the chart to see it full size.  Rookie saturation reached its highest levels in the early 1990's.  And except for the spikes in 2002-05, they haven't reached the 140 mark for a single set since.  Even if I were to combine the Topps and Update numbers together, they still wouldn't rival the Bowman numbers of the 90's.  Topps & Update would just about match the Bowman figures for the early 2000's.

So it had to start in the late 80's right?  None of the vintage sets before that probably had nearly that many rookies, did they?

Au contraire!

I went back to 1955 - mostly because it was a nice even number (and I had initially just done every five years to get a ballpark idea of the counts).  I listed out the counts for multi-player cards that appeared much more often back then in Flagship than they do now.  But there were almost just as many single player cards that were rookies along with the multi's.  So the counts were astonishingly high to me.

Remember I said that no set had hit the 140 mark except for '91-'94 and '02-'05 (plus a few in between)?  Check out the vintage levels!  '64, '65, '69, and '71 all surpass that mark, and several others come close!  The lowest number is 53 cards / 82 players. By just eyeballing it, the average is somewhere around 70 cards or over 100 players!  That means the average is well above most of the 2000's and a lot of the non-Topps sets of any decade!  Take out the Bowman bars on the previous graph, and vintage sets might double up most of the others!

So it is basically true that Topps + Topps Update has been issuing the highest numbers of rookie cards, but not just in the last few years.  It's been doing so since the turn of the century, and the numbers haven't moved much.  And you could even say that those numbers only ticked up a little since Topps started making cards in the first place.

Ironically, the conclusion I draw from this is that most collectors who get frustrated from the over-emphasis of rookie cards and the resulting concepts (like super short prints, mojo-centric products full of rookies, and other pitfalls of modern issues), go back to building vintage sets instead - where there are actually just as many, if not more rookies per capita!