A Mickey Mantle baseball card broke a five-month-old record for the best-selling sports card of all time and cost $ 5.2 million, the PWCC Marketplace announced on Thursday.
The 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle PSA 9 – PSA is a rating system ranging from 1 to 10 – set the record by a newbie Mike Trout that sold for $ 3.94 million in August. It is believed that only six PSA 9s of this Mantle card still exist.
Rob Gough, the actor who acquired streetwear brand Dope in 2017, bought the ’52 mantle, which former NFL lineman Evan Mathis sold for $ 2.88 million in 2018.
“The 1952 Topps Mantle is the holy grail of sports cards,” said Gough. “As a kid who tore up packs in the 90s, I always dreamed of owning one … I felt like this coat was grossly underrated.”
Not new to Mantle, the 1952 cards are known to be Topps’ first annual set, dumped by the thousands in the Hudson River in 1960 after overproduction.
Since August, Gough has collected a 1916 Rookie Ruth from Sporting News Babe Ruth, a 1917 Collins-McCarthy Joe Jackson, and several PSA 10 Michael Jordan rookie cards, among others.
The purchase marks another milestone amid a recent surge in big-money sports memorabilia sales. Ten ticket sales have now exceeded $ 900,000, eight of them in the past 12 months. Prior to the trout rookie’s sale in August, a T206 Honus Wagner PSA 5 sold in 2016 held the record at $ 3.12 million.
And the ceiling could rise even further. There are three recognized PSA 10 coats (classified as a “gem-mint” condition according to PSA, a “practically perfect card”), one of which was on an air-conditioned, UV-protected display and was transported by armored car in Colorado in 2018 They are worth more than $ 10 million each.