Five 1952 Mickey Mantle Topps Cards Exceed $1 Million At Auction

At a preview for Heritage’s recent Platinum Live Auction across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, Mickey Mantle hogged the attention, as usual. His 1952 Topps card is so hot that the auction house had five of them for sale at once. “For baby boomers, the card has supplanted the [Honus] Wagner as the face of the hobby,” Chris Ivy, the sports division’s director, told me.

That is saying a lot. After all, the Honus Wagner’s 1909-1911 tobacco issue has long been regarded as the most iconic baseball card. The finest example sold for $2.8 million in 2007, still the all-time public record for any baseball card by far.

I asked one of Heritage’s auctioneers to pull the Mantles out of their glass case and arrange them in a neat row so I could get my money shot for this post.

"Think about the rarity and the value of this pillar of the hobby!" auctioneer Mike Sadler declared during the sale, doing all he could to coax higher amounts from the bidders in the room and those on the phone and web.

By the time Heritage’s last hammer came down, the five ’52 Topps brought a combined $1 million. The best, a PSA 8 (near mint-mint), sold for $501,900 with the “juice” or buyer’s premium, not quite another record but close. The entire auction total $9.3 million.

The evening’s hero was surely Heritage’s gifted catalog writer, Jonathan Scheier. He cranked out some 2500, rhapsodic words about the Mantles. “It was absolutely a challenge to find five different ways to describe a card with condition as the only variable,” he e-mailed me. “But thankfully there are quite a few compelling stories about the card—ranging from the man himself to the quirks of distribution to the importance of the set itself—to provide source material.”

Scheier was referring to Topps' decision sometime around 1960 to dump unsold, high-number Topps, including the 1952 Mantles, in the Atlantic to clear room in the company's Brooklyn warehouse. For years Sy Berger, a Topps executive and the card's co designer, had failed to sell them at carnivals for a penny a piece, then 10 per penny. Kids simply wanted new cards.

True to form, Scheier rose to the occasion. “In the simplest terms, Mickey Mantle was a man of his age,” he wrote in one catalog description. “Just as Babe Ruth had personified the decadence of the Roaring Twenties, Mantle was emblematic of the American optimism that gave the world Elvis Presley and brightly colored automobiles with tail fins fit for a blue whale. We had won the war, rescued western civilization from genocidal totalitarianism, and we felt as if there was no stopping us. America was going big.”