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 RBIs 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 hobby-fresh example has mid-grade eye appeal with favorable centering (60/40 left to right and 55/45 top to bottom) and exceptional colors. We rarely use "brilliant registration" to describe any card from the 1950's, let alone the holy grail of them all. Consigned by a collector who acquired the card some 30+ years ago, it was recently graded "Authentic" by PSA whose experts uncovered an unspecified alteration; otherwise, it would qualify for VG to VG/EX in our book. Corners are evenly rounded and borders remain creamy white. The back is remarkably clean with bold red and black print. Color brightness and sharpness is off the charts, especially the glowing yellow of the bat and the deep blue of the sky background. Overall, it stands as a wonderful representation of the hobby's most coveted post-war baseball issue.