1959 Topps Willie Mays #50

The Giants moved from New York to San Francisco after the 1957 season, so Mays' 1959 Topps card shows him in his second year on the West Coast. He was at his peak: Wikipedia records twelve consecutive Gold Gloves from 1957 to 1968, and he finished his career with 660 home runs and a 1979 first-ballot Hall of Fame election. Robert Edward Auctions calls #50 one of the key cards in the 1959 set.

The 1959 Topps set

The card also sits inside a remarkable run of Mays' career. He had won the 1954 MVP and made “The Catch” off Vic Wertz in Game 1 of that year's World Series; he would win a second MVP in 1965 and was still collecting Gold Gloves when he left the Giants for the Mets in 1972. A 1959 card is therefore a mid-career card of a player already established as a star — one reason REA treats it as a key card of the set.

According to PSA's CardFacts, the 1959 set contains 572 cards measuring 2-1/2" by 3-1/2". The fronts are distinctive: a close-up photo in a baseball-shaped frame, a solid-color background above and below, a white border and a facsimile autograph across the picture. Topps added a long list of specialty cards — multi-player cards, team cards with checklists, All-Star cards, “Baseball Thrills”, 31 “Rookie Stars”, a Commissioner Ford Frick card and a Roy Campanella card showing him in a wheelchair.

Two printing details help date and sort the cards. Cards #507 and higher have backs printed in black and red with the number in a black box, while lower numbers use red and green with the number in a green box — so #50 has the red-and-green back. Some cards were reprinted with trade or demotion lines added to the back biography; the versions without those lines are scarcer. Cards #199–286 exist with white or gray backs, but #50 falls outside that range.

PSA population snapshot

Unlike the 1956 Mays, this card exists in PSA 10 — five of them — and the 47 PSA 9s give the market a steady supply of top-grade sales to price from.

Public sales records

Three PSA 9 sales within about seven months landed between $20,100 and $21,170, a tight range that suggests a well-established price for the grade. PSA's price table also shows a most recent PSA 10 price of $40,800, without a listed sale record. The step from PSA 8 to PSA 9 is large — REA's 2022 PSA 8, described as high-grade with a crisp image, bright colors and strong corners but centering slightly to the left, sold for $2,400 — and the centering remark shows why: at PSA 9 the front centering allowance tightens to 60/40, as our grading-scale guide sets out.

Reading a 1959 Mays listing

• Check the cert: the record should name 1959 Topps, #50 and Willie Mays.
• Look at the back color scheme: #50 should have the red-and-green back of the lower numbers.
• Compare the price with the grade's recent public results, not with the PSA 10 figure.
• For PSA 9 and 10, look closely at centering; the margin for error is small at the top of the scale.