The Reds’ Greene

Let’s start this out by addressing the elephant in the room with this card: The 1993 Finest Willie Greene Refractor is frustrating for set collectors. Greene has never been one of the rumored “short prints” in the checklist and has zero asterisks next to his name in Beckett alerting collectors to any kind of difficulty in acquiring the card. So why did this card prove so elusive for my set building project and why do so many previous set builders look askance at this particular number in the checklist? Why does a common card with no hint of scarcity command triple digit prices?

The quick answer is the PSA Set Registry. ’93 Refractors have long been a favorite project of registry participants. For decades relative shortages of graded examples of specific commons have generated temporary bumps in price as collectors sought out slabbed examples that could be added to their sets. High interest brought about higher prices, in turn incentivizing raw copies to be submitted for grading and an eventual increase in the size of the graded population.

Roughly 20 years ago Willie Greene was one of those names with a relatively low number of graded examples for registry collectors to chase. Competition for these slabs encouraged raw copies to be submitted, but the overall graded population was slow to change. Why? It turns out this particular card is more likely than others to have been cut short top-to-bottom by Topps back in 1993. Grading services are less likely to assign a numerical grade to cards failing to meet minimum size specifications, resulting in many of these newly submitted examples being rejected. While there wasn’t a scarcity of this particular card, there was a scarcity of graded examples eligible for the PSA Set Registry. Prices for graded examples soared and the graded collecting community took note of this card as being particularly difficult to obtain.

Today you’re looking at forking over well over $100 for a graded example. I certainly did and wasn’t particularly happy about it. I will gladly do that for a truly scarce card but the numbers do not justify that for this card. A dozen years ago there were 103 PSA graded examples, a number that has expanded to 148. That puts Willie Greene’s refractor among the top 50% of refractors in terms of the quantity graded. The graded scarcity is gone. With more than half the set now featuring lesser numbers of graded examples, all that remains to support crazy pricing is this collective memory of scarcity.

Furthermore, there is no transactional scarcity. Some cards command excess collector attention because they rarely see the light of day. Those searching for Ivan Rodriguez cards can certainly attest to this. No such shortage of listings plagues those seeking a Willie Greene card. 31 copies have changed hands in the last 36 months, a total very much in line with your average refractor.

Some sort of premium may be warranted for graded Greene cards compared to raw examples, as what are left ungraded are highly likely to be substandard size cards. I strongly recommend avoiding any raw example of this card if your goal is to avoid ungradable cards. That said, the dramatic premium this card commands isn’t supported by the underlying supply-side fundamentals.

Fundamentals

That’s enough of the fundamentals of supply and demand for a piece of cardboard. Let’s take a look at Greene’s actual performance on the field. Those totals show a guy most would pass over when flipping through the contents of a pack of cards. Greene undoubtedly had power (annualized pace of 20+ HRs) but struggled to make consistent contact (.234 batting average).

So why was he in the Topps Finest checklist? The short answer is he was one of a rising class of power hitting infielders on their way to the majors. He spent most of 1992 in the minor leagues, hitting 27 homers in just 130 games. That’s impressive power from a premium defensive position and he was just as adept at playing shortstop in the rare instances when Barry Larkin was unavailable. Hitting that number of bombs in the majors would put him solidly in the top 3 among third basemen in almost any given year. He was even batting a respectable .279 between all three levels of ball that season.

Greene looked like a major league ready, standout third baseman. The only problem was Chris Sabo and Barry Larkin had locks on the two defensive positions in which he excelled. Had this been an earlier Reds team the organization would have simply traded him for yet another all-star caliber player. They had, after all, sent John Wetteland to the Expos in exchange for Greene after discovering a surplus of pitching talent in their bullpen. Instead, the team kept him in a series of partial seasons through 1998 before sending him along the Chris Sabo Highway connecting Cincinnati and Baltimore. While Greene only had two “full” 130+ game seasons in this period, he did manage to hit 55 HRs with OPS percentages well into the .800s from 1996-1998. There were enough highlights to keep fans hoping and despite what sounds like me complaining about lackluster performance he was easily among the Reds’ best players in the mid-1990s.

From the Reds to the Red Planet

I’m not a prospect guy. I generally don’t care about someone tearing up the minor leagues or tables ranking upcoming prospects that are years away from making an impact on a major league lineup. I’m happy to sit back and watch with awe as baseball card collectors fight over cards of players still years away from seeing their first MLB curveball, and that is exactly what comes to mind when thinking about Willie Greene’s cardboard.

Greene wasn’t the highest ranked prospect in the early ’90s, but he was still the number one draft pick of the pennant contending Pittsburgh Pirates. He didn’t get his first plate appearance until the last weeks of the 1992 season but had already been a staple of big league card sets for three years. He first shows up in 1990 with the Pirates, 1991 with the Expos, and in 1992 he was apparently taking batting practice while working at the local mall.