The journey of a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card won in a game of pinochle by a Red Sox fan

New York Times

18-03-2025

When you're a baseball card person who has written extensively about the hobby, you expect people to come out of the woodwork with claims of valuable cards. It can be a friend of a friend, a person coming to you through a relative or even someone contacting you in the comment section of an article you've written.
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And 99 times out of 100, you have to be the bearer of bad news. 'Yeah those cards from the 1990s are really not worth anything.' 'Yeah that Babe Ruth is definitely fake and not a good one.' 'So it's a legit Mickey Mantle but a miscut 1959 in poor condition that is worth $100 maybe, not $100,000.' 'You maybe would have something if your great uncle didn't take all his 1960s cards and put them in his bicycle spikes.'
So when reader Rich Koffman wrote to me that his parents had an autographed Mickey Mantle rookie card, I admit to trying to stop my eyes from rolling. Talk about a one-in-1,000 chance (insert Dumb and Dumber GIF). But it's true that every great card story does start this way, despite the odds; and since the person was a reader, I felt an obligation to follow up. I started the way I always do: 'Send me a photo.'
What came back was the kind of photo my mother would take. It looked like it was taken with a flip phone. The only thing in clear focus was the screws from the dreaded screw-down plastic case (they can flatten the card if too tight and make it too big to be graded). But it wasn't the Mantle rookie (the 1951 Bowman). It was the 1952 Topps, the holy grail of the hobby. And it wasn't autographed — the signature was just the design element in the marquee on the front of the card.
Now, roughly 99.9 percent of raw 1952 Topps Mantles are fake. But the fact that this one was poorly centered was actually a good sign. Maybe the odds that this was fake were only 95 percent. There was also no fake aging, like totally symmetrical rounded corners or muted colors on the front. The image on the card was pretty great. So I did research on how to tell if this specific card is authentic. It passed every test — general print quality, especially of the bat and having the yellow bleed out from under the star marquee being chief among them.
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This card is a Type 1 (of two types) 1952 Mantle, meaning it has a solid border and straight stars around the marquee and a black border around the Yankees logo. The most important authentication proof is that the bottom left black border needs to be missing one pixel that makes that corner appear more rounded than square. It passed that test, too.
I concluded it was very likely real and would grade, and well above a 1 (poor), too. I put Koffman in touch with an expert I knew at PWCC/now Fanatics Collect and he quickly responded that he agreed with me that the card was authentic and would grade.
I suddenly felt like I helped give birth to a 1952 Mantle. It was like the stories of a cabby delivering a baby in the back of a cab. Soon, the card was graded — it's an SGC 2.5. And it's for sale now on the Fanatics Collect website, with the auction ending this week. That's the end of the story, at least for the Koffmans. How did it begin?
It started with a game of pinochle. Richard's grandfather was a good card player. According to Richard's father, Elliot, they were playing for money around 1980 and someone owed Elliot's father $100. He was offered the Mantle card instead of the cash and took it. This was very wise by the grandfather even then, because in 1983 the card in this condition was valued at $200.
'It's very weird that my father had one card and it was THAT card,' Elliot said. And he wasn't even a Yankees fan, far from it. 'The (pinochle) game was in Brookline (MA). We always went to the Red Sox games.'
Elliot didn't know about the card until his mother died. His father then lived to be 99. The card was kept under glass on the dresser.
'My father said it was his,' Elliot said. 'When he died in 1998, we took it. I had a friend who collected cards who said it was worth holding onto. We kept it in a case and in a bank vault and then moved it to a little safe in the house.'
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In the fall of 2024, after the card was certified to be authentic, Hurricane Milton hit and Elliot was worried that his Florida home may have flooded. That would have given his 1952 Mantle a similar fate to the ones that were sunk in the Atlantic off a barge to free up storage space at the Topps headquarters, then in Brooklyn. 'But there was no flooding, fortunately.'
Elliot considered keeping it and letting his son Richard deal with it down the road. But the hurricane brought into sharp relief that paper is fragile and easy to damage. With the prices and demand for the card so high, he felt the time to deal with it was now.
'It's so valuable,' he said. 'So we may as well do something with it.'
Fanatics had the card graded. Even though the grade is only good-plus (a 2.5), the eye appeal of the card and especially the image and corners is higher than the overall grade. SGC says of a 2.5, 'A GOOD card that exhibits high-end overall quality and eye appeal.'
A high-end vintage dealer contacted by The Athletic said that the card is missing a little paper on the front and that it's fairly graded.
Note that typically cards can't have more than one grade higher overall than the lowest component grade. But what makes cards like this specific Mantle desirable for collectors is when other aspects of the card (corners, color, edges, image) grade significantly higher than the overall grade.
According to Card Ladder, the last SGC 2.5 with similar centering was auctioned for $43,200 in April of 2024. The most recent sale of any 2.5, one graded by PSA, sold for $45,900 on March 6.
Not a bad return on a $100 game of pinochle.
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(Top image: Fanatics Collect)