The 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle and the Most Expensive Baseball Card in History

At 12:28 AM on August 28, 2022, Heritage Auctions in Dallas sold a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card for $12.6 million. It was the most expensive baseball card ever sold at auction, the most expensive sports card of any kind, and the most expensive sports collectible in history, surpassing the $9.3 million sale of Diego Maradona's 1986 World Cup jersey earlier that year.

The card had been in the hands of one man, Anthony Giordano, for 31 years. He bought it in 1991 for $50,000 from Alan "Mr. Mint" Rosen, the most famous card dealer in the hobby. Giordano kept it ungraded and hidden away for three decades before bringing it to Heritage.

When Heritage submitted the card to Sportscard Guaranty Corporation (SGC) for grading, it came back Mint+ 9.5, the highest grade ever assigned to a 1952 Topps Mantle. Chris Ivy, Heritage's director of sports auctions, called it "a miracle" that the card had survived 70 years with perfect centering, sharp corners, and bright colors.

The story of the card's survival begins with a telephone call. In the mid-1980s, Rosen received a call from a man in suburban Boston who claimed to have a large collection of 1952 Topps high-number cards in mint condition. The man said his father had been a delivery driver and that a case of unsold product had been sitting in his basement for more than 30 years. Rosen was skeptical but drove to the man's house.

"He put this big tray of cards on the table," Rosen later told interviewers, "and he says, 'They're in numerical order, don't worry.' So I went 268, 285, I got to 306. So I took 306 off the top, 308, 309, and there it was. 311." Card number 311 was the Mantle. Rosen kept counting. There were 75 copies of the Mantle in the collection. He paid $125,000 for all 5,500 cards.

The 1952 Topps set is rare for a specific reason. The high-number series (cards 311 through 407, which included Mantle at 311) was printed late in the season and arrived in stores too late to sell. Topps was stuck with cases of unsold inventory. The company eventually loaded the surplus onto a barge and dumped it in the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the 1952 high-number cards that survive today came from collections assembled before the dumping. An estimated 1,800 copies of the Mantle exist, but the vast majority are in poor condition, damaged by decades of handling, storage, and, in some cases, bicycle spokes.

The card itself is deceptively simple. It measures 2-5/8 by 3-3/4 inches, slightly larger than the standard cards of its era. It features a color photograph of Mantle in his Yankees uniform, mid-swing, against a solid yellow and red background. His facsimile signature is printed across the bottom. The back includes his statistics and a short biography. It was not the most expensive card to produce or the most elaborate in design. It was, and is, valuable because of who is on it, when it was made, and how few survived in good condition.

Mantle played 18 seasons for the Yankees. He hit 536 home runs, won three MVP awards, appeared in 12 World Series, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1974. He was the most popular player of the 1950s and early 1960s, the successor to Joe DiMaggio and the embodiment of the postwar Yankees dynasty. His 1952 Topps card is the first card of the modern era, the template for every baseball card that followed, and the single most iconic piece of cardboard in the history of the hobby.

Before the $12.6 million sale, a different 1952 Topps Mantle, graded PSA 9, had sold for $5.2 million in January 2021. A PSA 7.5 copy sold at the same Heritage auction as the record-setting card for $705,000, a record for that grade. The card's value has risen at every grade level in every year it has been tracked.

"An eight-figure result in the sports market was the stuff of fantasy just a decade ago," Ivy said after the sale. It is no longer fantasy. It is a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, number 311 in the set, and it is worth more than most houses in America.