1952 Topps Mickey Mantle

The PSA 8 Graded 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle Sotheby’s Auctioned In 2005

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In June 2005, Sotheby’s offered this gorgeous PSA 8 graded 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle in their Important Sports Memorabilia and Cards catalog. The expected sales price was $40-50k! It’s now a million-dollar card after changing hands at least two more times!

I’m unsure what Sotheby’s sold the card for, or if it changed hands again, but in November 2014, it showed up in SCP’s Fall Premier Auction, where it sold for $268k.

Then, in May 2017, Memory Lane had the same card in their Spring Holy Grail Rarities Auction, where it sold for $462k.

I’m unsure if that buyer sold it since, but the PSA Card page for the cert shows that it was re-slabbed. Behold, over a million dollars in its plastic tomb!

It would be pretty cool if someone would trace the lineage of all the high-grade (PSA and SGC 8+) 1952 Mickey Mantle cards. It’s sort of just happened that I’ve started such a task with the T206 Wagner cards:

Happy Collecting!

From $121K to $50M? Revisiting the Iconic 1952 Mantle and Other 1996 Hobby Highlights

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Doug Kale published this piece in the January 1997 issue of Sports Card Trader, highlighting three significant sports collectibles events: The 1996 East Coast National, the Superior Sportscards Auction, where Marshall Fogel bought his 1952 Topps PSA 10 Mantle for $121k, and the September 21st sale of the Greztky/McNall T206 Wagner for $640,500.

There’s been talk around the hobby that the 1952 Topps PSA 10 Mantle cards could be worth $50M now; before Fogel displayed the card during the 2021 All-Star Game, he said he had rejected a $25M offer for it.

Here are a few photos from the Colorado Rockies Facebook page from that event.

For a bit more, Sports Collectors Digest has a nice piece about how Topps’ 1952 Mickey Mantle Became the Most Iconic Card in Hobby History.

For more about the infamous T206 Wagner’s history, click here.

Happy collecting!

Private Collections Reap Big Sales – A Sports Cards’ Auction Report From 1996

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Sports Cards Magazine & Price Guide had a great feature in the mid-’90s, providing “a wrapup of some of the country’s largest sports auctions.” This one from September 1996 was chockful of incredible items.

Larson highlighted the John F. Kennedy signed ball as the highlight of Mastro’s auction that topped $850,000 in sales. But I wanted to compare two of the cards to today’s prices. The PSA 8 graded 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle sold for $24,394; today, that’s probably a $1M card. And the PSA 8 1914 Crack Jack Joe Jackson, well, Heritage sold one nine years ago for $101k.

As for the rest of the article, half of that stuff won’t show up for sale again, but if any of it does, you can bet on it being a lot pricier!

ACU-Card – America’s First Independent Sports Card Grading Service

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I scanned this ad for ACU-Card from the Spring 1990 issue (Edition 2) of Topps Magazine. 

Frankly, dozens of third-party authenticators have come and gone. You can see a great list of them here on the Collectors forums. What I’m more interested in is where that 1952 Topps Mantle card is today (by the way, there’s no way it’s real).

I’ve read that a coin dealer named Alan Hager started the company. Many collectors have shared that he wasn’t really a high-integrity character. But If you want to add a piece of hobby history to your collection, you can still find a bunch of ACU-Card slabs on eBay.