I want to begin what I like about my Harold Reynolds refractor with a brief look at a totally different parallel card. Five years earlier, Topps released a high gloss version of its 1988 set. The cards were printed on higher quality cardstock that made photos pop and text on card backs much easier to read. Reynolds appears twice in the set, once on his own card and again on the front of a card identifying the top Seattle Mariners in various statistical categories.
Reynolds, pictured on the left, lead not only the Mariners but the entire American League in stolen bases in 1987. He was the only AL player not named Rickey Henderson to lead the league throughout the entire decade. Henderson, who had missed a third of the season and nabbed 41 bases himself, called Reynolds right after the season ended. He “congratulated” his Seattle rival by telling him he should be ashamed of himself for “only” stealing 60 bases in a full season. The seemingly always happy Reynolds looks like he just got off the phone on this card.
Reynolds also won three consecutive gold glove awards for defensive work at second base in 1988-1990. This has always been an odd award with defensive metrics an area that has received much less analytical work than other aspects of the game. Reynolds was certainly very good and his performance looks award-worthy given the few stats that were typically followed at the time. He led the league in double plays, assists, putouts, and games played at second base through much of the late-1980s. Amazingly he was charged with more errors than any other second baseman from 1987-1990, though given his other stats this appears to be the result of volume rather than playmaking ability. Later metrics, such as range factor, place him as a top-5 second baseman through much of this period.
Reynolds appears to be the answer to what Ozzie Smith’s career would look like if he only had all-star level defensive ability rather than all-time greatest shortstop-level performance.
A Short Refractor?
There’s a bit of weirdness going on with my card. Seeking a better understanding of the set’s centering, I made a series of extremely high-quality scans and measured the number of pixels at various points along the borders. The ratios of these measurements were fairly constant across most cards, but relationships between the top and bottom areas of this particular card were noticeably different. I applied a normal distribution to the range of measurements and found this to be well outside the variation that one would expect. In short, this card is a different size than the rest. It’s short from top to bottom while exhibiting the same width as other cards.
Did I buy a trimmed card? I doubt that, as this has not been a set that is typically doctored. My card originated from the collection of Phil Gold who tended to purchase raw cards without regard for condition.
A more likely scenario is that this card was cut short by Topps’ contract manufacturer during the production process. There are several cards in the checklist that are difficult to find in graded slabs, not because of absolute scarcity, but because they get rejected for not meeting minimum size requirements. Willie Greene seems to be one of those affected, as does Orestes Destrade. I found a heated exchange about these short cards on a multipage thread on the Collectors Universe message board, including one post in which a long-time collector asserts a quarter of Reynolds cards have the same sizing issue as mine. I don’t know how this number was arrived at, so I hesitate to accept the precision of the statement. I have, however, seen nothing that calls this out as being inaccurate and my own experience shows there are indeed short Reynolds cards out there. I am still gathering data on these cards and have a theory I hope to present at a later time.
I sent my card off to PSA for their opinion in late 2020. The card came back in 2022 (nothing “short” about that wait time) in a PSA 8 slab. Perhaps this example falls within the grading company’s tolerance for variation in size, or possibly they aren’t looking as closely at this time. Oh well, what matters is that I have the shiniest Harold Reynolds card ever made and it is in a display case that matches everything else this obsessed collector has assembled.
