A piece of cardboard became the most valuable sports collectible ever sold at 12:28 in the morning, in the middle of a Dallas auction that had been building up for weeks. A Mint+ 9.5 grade from Sportscard Guaranty Corporation was given to the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card, which sold at Heritage Auctions’ Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction for $12.6 million. A lot of people would have thought that number was crazy even five years ago.
Even before the bidding ended, the card had already broken a record. A few weeks ago, the price went over the $6.6 million that was paid for a T206 Honus Wagner card, which is almost mythical in the collecting world. Then it was more than the $9.3 million that Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” jersey sold for just a few months before. The Mantle had not only set a new record by the time the gavel fell early Sunday morning, it had also passed everyone else in the field.
It’s not just the grade of this card that makes it stand out. That’s the story behind it. Anthony Giordano, a businessman from New Jersey who works in waste management, bought the card at a show in New York City in 1991 for $50,000, which was a record at the time. Alan “Mr. Mint” Rosen was selling the cards. He was a dealer who bought a bunch of cards from a man in Massachusetts in the mid-1980s. The cards included a lot of Mantle copies. Most of them had been kept in an attic for more than 30 years in an old Topps Chewing Gum box. Rosen wrote a letter saying that he thought this Mantle was the best example of its kind in the whole world. Giordano put it away and didn’t grade it for thirty years.
In the best way possible, that sounds almost stubborn. During those decades, the market for sports collectibles went up and down, grading services became more official, and auction records came and went. But this card sat there quietly, untouched. People who had been following its journey weren’t too surprised when it finally got to Heritage earlier this year and was sent to SGC to be graded. “It has the best qualities that a 1952 Topps card can have: perfect centering, registration, and four sharp corners,” said Chris Ivy, who is in charge of sports auctions at Heritage. Being that way for seventy years isn’t just luck. It’s almost like a miracle.
The sale also didn’t happen by chance at that time. Sports memorabilia has been steadily going up in value, and the pandemic sped up this trend in a way that few other industries could match. Ivy from Heritage saw a clear pattern: when people were stuck at home, they picked up old hobbies, went through old collections, and started to treat sports cards less like junk and more like valuable things. As a way to protect themselves from inflation, investors, especially Gen X and older millennials, became interested in memorabilia. Rich collectors from around the world poured in. According to the research firm Market Decipher, a market that was worth only $5.4 billion in 2018 had grown to $26 billion by 2021.
It’s possible that some of that growth was just over-the-top excitement caused by the pandemic, which will eventually settle down. It doesn’t feel like a bubble moment, though. Instead, it feels like the market is finally realizing what serious collectors have been saying for years: that rare, high-quality sports cards are as important to culture as fine art. “Some people might say it’s just a baseball card,” Oklahoma State professor of sports management law John Holden said. “It is only a Picasso.” For some, it’s just a Rembrandt. When the price tag says eight figures, that comparison doesn’t make as much sense.
Mickey Mantle was a switch-hitting slugger who won the Triple Crown in 1956 and was named three-time AL MVP, seven-time World Series champion, and player of the year. He has never really been forgotten in American sports, even though he died in 1995. His 1952 Topps card has been thought of as the “Holy Grail” of the hobby for a long time, in part because it is so hard to find in high grade and in part because of the man. People still watched it at 12:28 in the morning, which is why it sold.
Giordano got a return on his money that no other investment from 1991 could have matched. The card he bought for $50,000 was worth 252 times that amount when it was sold. Folks say that the books have been wiped clean.
