Malcolm Emmons-USA TODAY Sports
Collectors have spent decades paying increasingly ridiculous amounts of money for Mickey Mantle’s iconic 1952 Topps card, so apparently the hobby eventually had to work backward to the thing that existed before the cardboard. The original photograph Topps used to create the card’s famous image just sold privately for $3 million.
The 7-by-9-inch black-and-white photograph was taken during Yankees spring training in Phoenix on March 5, 1951, months before Mantle made his major-league debut. Hunt Auctions brokered the private transaction, with Sports Collectors Daily reporting the price established a record for a Type I sports photograph.
The Cardboard Is Not Even The Most Interesting Part Anymore
This was basically the raw material for one of the most recognizable baseball cards ever made.
International News Service originally distributed the photo regionally rather than nationally, which helped make surviving originals extremely scarce. Topps later used Mantle’s portrait as the basis for the painted image on card No. 311 in its 1952 set.
The photograph carries PSA’s coveted Type I classification, which means it was developed from the original negative within roughly two years of the image being taken. PSA considers Type I examples the most desirable category because they are first-generation photographs created closest to the moment itself.
Only a handful of Type I versions of this particular Mantle image are known, which apparently makes $3 million sound reasonable to somebody.
The same kind of photograph sold for $375,000 in 2019. Another Type I image, the photograph used for his actual 1951 Bowman rookie card, sold for $843,750 in 2024, which made it the most expensive one ever sold in the category.
Now the 1952 Topps source photo has essentially taken that market and launched it into another tax bracket.
The Buyer Also Owns A $12.6 Million Card
Here is where this turns from expensive collecting into assembling the world’s most ridiculous before-and-after set.
The buyer was commercial real-estate investor Ron Firman, who also owns the famous SGC Mint+ 9.5 example of the 1952 Topps Mantle that Heritage sold for $12.6 million in 2022.
So one collector now owns both the photograph and the cardboard masterpiece it helped create. Combined purchase price: $15.6 million.
There is also a funny distinction worth making whenever the 1952 Mantle comes up. Despite frequently being called a rookie card, Mantle’s recognized rookie was issued by Bowman in 1951. The 1952 version was his first Topps card and simply became so famous that it eventually swallowed almost everything else connected to his collecting market.
Now even the source material is worth more than most pieces of luxury real estate.