1952 Topps Mickey Mantle #311

PSA's CardFacts entry calls the 1952 Topps Mantle “arguably, the most important baseball card in the entire industry” and says that if there were a Mount Rushmore of cards limited to one spot, this card would take it. It is the first Topps card of Mickey Mantle, the key to Topps' first major baseball set, and the card behind the $12.6 million sale that set the sports-card auction record in August 2022.

The card and the set

The 1952 Topps set has 407 cards measuring 2-5/8" by 3-3/4", marketed as “Giant Size” and issued in six series. Sy Berger and Woody Gelman designed it in autumn 1951, reportedly at a kitchen table in Brooklyn. Mantle's card, #311, opens the sixth and final series, #311–407. According to PSA, retailers cut or cancelled orders for that late series in anticipation of weak end-of-season sales, so it was minimally distributed; the lot notes for a 2024 Fanatics Collect / Sotheby's sale say whole cases went unsold and were returned.

The famous coda: Berger said that in 1960 he had the leftover high-series cases — “three garbage trucks full” — dumped into the Atlantic from a barge. Wikipedia notes the story is considered highly suspect and that the cards may have been shipped to Venezuela instead. Either way, the sixth series is genuinely scarce. #311 was double-printed on its press sheet, which is one reason it survives in larger numbers than other high numbers.

It is not technically Mantle's rookie card — PSA identifies the 1951 Bowman as that — but the hobby treats the 1952 Topps as his defining card. In the mid-1980s dealer Al Rosen bought a large hoard of high-grade high numbers (PSA dates the find to 1986 in Lowell, Massachusetts, while Sports Collectors Digest says 1985), which is the origin of many of the finest surviving Mantles.

PSA population snapshot

The three PSA 10s are among the most famous cards in the hobby; PSA's condition census attaches the Fogel and Kendrick collection pedigrees to two of them. Note how heavily the population sits in low grades — almost 400 PR 1 examples and more than 200 Authentic (ungraded) slabs — which reflects how valuable even a damaged copy is.

Notable public sales

The $12.6 million card was one of Rosen's finds. Sports Collectors Digest reports that Anthony Giordano bought it, ungraded, for $50,000 at a 1991 Madison Square Garden card show and kept it for three decades before consigning it to Heritage, which had it graded before the sale. Its price more than doubled the previous record for the card.

What a PSA 2.5 looks like

For most collectors the relevant market is the low-grade end, the grade named in the old lot address that once lived on this domain. REA's description of the PSA 2.5 (GOOD+) it sold in 2022 is a useful picture of the grade: brilliant color and strong registration, moderate corner wear, centering slightly to the left, light staining along the lower borders and a surface crease visible on the reverse. That example brought $72,000; an example described almost identically sold for the same figure in REA's Summer 2025 auction.