The real print run of 1993 Finest Refractors

[priestc]

The general consensus you see everywhere is 241 copies of each card. You see this printed everywhere. If you look at the population reports:

http://www.psacard.com/Pop/Detail.aspx?c=36295
http://www.beckett.com/grading/set_match/4024441

Look at Frank Thomas: 252 graded by PSA, 23 graded by Beckett, plus all the cards still ungraded. If you search for "1993 finest refractor frank thomas" you'll see two graded and two ungraded for sale. Looking at completed listings I see roughly the same ratio. Therefore its reasonable to assume half of all copies in hobby hands are ungraded. That puts the estimated print run to be about 500 cards each. I guess Frank Thomas could have been double printed, but many other players have more than 100 PSA graded examples. Thats almost half of all printed examples. How likely is that? That seems awfully high to me.

As far as I can tell, topps never officially confirmed the 241 number, its just the number that gets copied around. I guess it doesn't really make a difference, considering 500 is still pretty scarce...