When Mickey Mantle made his debut with the Yankees, writer Leonard Schecter said of him, “He has a face as open as the part of America that he came from.” So there he was, a kid of nineteen, already heralded as the second coming of Babe Ruth, or at the very least the legitimate successor to Joe DiMaggio. “When he hits the ball, it even sounds different,” they said about him. “He’s got it in his body to be great,” added grizzled manager Casey Stengel, who had been around long enough to qualify as an expert. Such expectations are hard to measure up to, but Mantle did, and then some. At the time of this cards release in 1952 however, Mantle’s future was uncertain. He started slow with the Yankees, even finding himself farmed to Kansas City for fine tuning at one point a year earlier. However, by the mid-1950’s, when the tape-measure homers boomed off his bat and the RBI and runs scored accumulated, Mantle’s destiny took shape.

Today, Mantle’s 1952 Topps issue is royalty in the field of card collecting.  A Gem-Mint copy currently stands as the the most expensive card ever sold. This offered example earned a VG rating by the experts at PSA. The skyward portrait of the young slugger has seen some blemishes over the decades, but the card has better centering than most (60/40 left to right and 35/65 top to bottom) and is void of any surface creasing. Corners are evenly rounded and borders remain fairly clean. The back is very clean with bold red and black print. Color quality on the front is average with some slight fading apparent on the blue background. Overall this gem has no major defects and stands as a fantastic representation of the hobby's most recognized and coveted post-war baseball card.