1954 Mickey Mantle Discovery

What a powerhouse!!

Here is a Mantle card you don’t see that often. Not a very desirable card but one of my favorites.

Just found this Gem that I had mixed in with my cards.

The 1953 Tops set was designed with beautiful water colors that give the cards a realistic but animated effect.

One of my first Mantle cards that I picked up in the late 1980! If only I had the money at the time to pick up the 52’Tops!!!! Oh well I still love the card and it makes me happy and that’s one of the most important parts of collecting anything.

Just a cool Mantle card from the 1960.

The 1956 Tops set has always been one of my favorites.

Baseball card collecting is a passion I have had since I was a little boy. Here is an insight to a discovery I made a few years ago. To all you baseball card collectors and especially NY Yankees fans enjoy.

I have been collecting baseball cards since the early 1970s and I have always loved the older cards. Like most young boys, I was mainly interested in the current heroes at the time like Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, Pete Rose Thurman Munson and my favorite Steve Garvey from the Dodgers. Being able to walk to the store, buy the wax packs, collect my favorite players, trade for cards that I wanted and, the ultimate best, flipping cards as the winner took all was everything a kid could want to do back then. How far we have come or shall I say gone backwards, imagine a 7-year-old kid walking to the store alone today and we won’t even get into the video gaming that has totally handicapped our youth’s ability to communicate with one another. One of the best parts about opening the wax packs form the 1970s was that piece of bubble gum that came with the cards. I would stack the powdered gum sticks 5-10 tall and shove them all in my mouth while blowing bubbles and looking for the best cards. I was pretty good at flipping and having over 10,000 cards from my early days is a testament to my skills as a young boy.

Luckily I wasn’t one of the “MOM” casualties that we often hear about in the hobby, well technically I was but the cards weren’t mine, I’ll get into that in a bit. Throughout the card trading industry, “MOM” has become sort of the grim reaper, the hooded executioner, the reason why so many of you Baby Boomers aren’t millionaires today! I have heard all the stories, Mom found my baseball cards in a shoebox in my closet and she threw them out, Mom found them in a bag in my basement and put them in the garbage, Mom found my baseball cards in the attic with my Playboys, spanked me and threw them out. That last one hurt and I’m not talking physically but we won’t go there now. If you only would have kept that 52’ Mantle in a safe place or that 48’ Jackie Robinson in a book or that 39’ Ted Williams with your birth certificate you would have been very well off today. My point of all of this is that the early cards always bring in a premium at the auction houses. Why, because people disregarded them and considered them garbage. We didn’t value them at the time even though baseball was considered Americas pass time they were just paper. I’m guessing that back in 1952 you could have probably bought a 1909-11 T206 Honus Wagner card that was in excellent condition for probably $100-$200. That same card sold at auction for $3.12 million in October of 2016!! WOW is right!

I have an early memory of going to my Grandfather’s apartment building on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. It was in 1975 and a good friend of his who lived on the 3rd floor had just passed away. Grandpa was in charge of cleaning out his apartment. The gentleman that passed was in his late 70s and needless to say his apartment was filled with stuff. My sister and I stayed downstairs with Grandma while Dad and Mom went upstairs to help clean up the place. On the car ride home I will never forget the words that my mom said to me, “Jay, you didn’t want a bag of old baseball cards that was in the apartment, did you?” Those words will forever haunt me. It turned out that my Mom stumbled upon a brown shopping bag filled with old black and white baseball cards. I could only wonder how many Ruths, Wagners, DiMaggios, Gehrigs, Cobbs and the list goes on that were in that bag. Remember this guy was in his late 70s in 1975 so if he started collecting cards as a young boy of 8 years old the year would have been somewhere around 1910. Anyway I like to dream of what could have been and all those cards that slipped through my fingers. Getting to the reason that I am writing this its to make the Baseball collecting hobby a bit more exciting for all of us that still feel like that 10-year-old little boy or girl when we are looking at cards. I have made an epic discovery that has literally been in front of our eyes for the past 66 years.

As the major card companies like Tops, Bowman and Leaf were battling for the number one position in the sports card market they would do certain things to cards, change them up a bit to make them more appealing to the collector. One brilliant move that Bowman did in 1954 was to sign the players exclusively to their card company. This in turn would force collectors to cross over to another card company in order to acquire that particular players card. I could only guess that this was a Hail Mary Pass that the Bowman Co. was doing being that Tops had pretty much controlled most of the sports card trading industry since the release of the coveted 1952 set. So who is one of the most prolific, energetic, clutch and larger than life player at the time to bring over to Bowman, save the company and for the exclusive printing baseball card rights none other than Mickey Mantle. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out for them, however, they did stop Tops from producing a 1954 Mickey Mantle card and here is where it gets exciting for collectors.

An obscure magazine started printing in 1954 and you probably never heard of it, ‘Sports Illustrated’. Well in order to make the magazine more appealing to the masses the first issues contained baseball card pullouts that were considered to be exact replicas of the 1954 Tops baseball trading cards. The second Sports Illustrated magazine was released on August 23, 1954 and it contained the entire NY Yankees roster of 27 players. Fifteen of the twenty seven cards were exact replicas of the 54’ Tops cards. They are exact in every way shape and form with the exception of the thickness of the stock it was printed on. The remaining twelve black and white cards were never produced by Tops that year so they cannot be considered reprints or duplicates. These black and white baseball cards are original productions. They may not have been sanctioned by Tops card company but they are absolutely originals. The cards were produced by Sports Illustrated Magazine and no other printing company thus they should be considered original cards. We have had Tabaco companies, bread companies, cake companies, and many more produce cards from our favorite pastime and no one has questioned their authenticity. Why is this any different, it’s not. So the most exciting thing about all of this is that here we have an original 1954 Mickey Mantle that has been eluding us for decades!! I have to imagine that there aren’t many of these cards around so grading pops will probably be very low. What that means ladies and gentleman is “Let the treasure hunt begin.”

With this information none of the major grading companies should have an issue with certifying any of these cards as originals. If they opt to not certify these cards as originals than they are doing an injustice to the card collecting hobby. Just to reiterate I am not saying to certify them as Tops cards because that is what we have assumed they were and they are NOT, I am saying to certify them as original Sports Illustrated trading cards. Hopefully this article will shed some light on these amazing rare cards.

https://www.pinterest.com/jay17quin/1954-mickey-mantle-card/

7 Best 1954 Mickey Mantle Card images in 2020 | Color card, The originals, Black, white Jan 5, 2020 - These black and white baseball cards are original productions. They may not have been sanctioned by Tops card company but they are absolutely originals. The cards were produced by Sports Illustrated Magazine and no other printing company. So the most exciting thing about all of this is...