'Holy Grail' baseball card needs $12M insurance and armed guards
The law of supply and demand is as immutable as gravity, and sometimes that creates some astonishing displays of its real-world application.
Consider the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card, which, in mint condition, is considered the baseball card hobby’s “Holy Grail.”
In its day, the ’52 Topps Mantle card was worth only a few cents because … well, cards had no collector value at the time. But 66 years of moms cleaning out attics and childhood bedrooms, kids destroying the cards by putting them in the spokes of their bicycles, the ravages of time, and all the other things that conspire to make perishable items like cardboard perish have conspired to leave just three such cards in existence today that are known to be in mint condition.
Also adding to its scarcity was something environmentally unfriendly by today’s standards. Hundreds of cases of unsold 1952 Topps Baseball cards met a watery grave in the Atlantic Ocean nearly a decade later — it was legal to dump refuse such as paper and cardboard at the time — as Topps needed room in its warehouse and no secondary market existed at the time for unopened cases of baseball cards.
The popularity of Mantle, the significance of the 1952 set being the first baseball set by Topps and the extreme scarcity of this specific card is why a mint ’52 Mantle card on display at the History Colorado Center has a $12 million insurance policy on it, will be transported via armored truck, displayed for only three days, and be guarded at all times such that you’d have to be Tom Cruise in the “Mission: Impossible” movies to pilfer it.
“I want the community to enjoy looking at the card,” said its owner, retired lawyer Marshall Fogel of Denver. “It’s the finest card ever made, and it just happens to be my favorite player, Mickey Mantle.”
According to the Associated Press, the case in which the card will be displayed is no stranger to astounding relics; it once housed a Bible that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson, keeping it in its holy condition with UV-lens glass and a temperature and humidity control system.
Fogel normally keeps his treasure safely hidden away, even from himself, in a safe-deposit vault at his local bank.
The Mantle card is one of two truly legendary baseball cards, right up there in value with the world-famous 1909 Honus Wagner T206, a card whose rarity comes, based on hobby lore, from Wagner demanding his card be pulled as an insert from cigarette packs because he didn’t want kids to be tempted to buy tobacco products; the reality, however, is that Wagner wasn’t asked for permission to have cards with his likeness produced and he ordered them pulled from the product because he wasn’t getting paid.
Fogel’s card also has the distinction of being unique among the three Mantle cards graded a 10 on the 10-point PSA grading scale. While all three are regarded as mint condition, Fogel’s version is the only “perfect 10,” the absolute best of the best, making his $12 million keepsake truly one of a kind.
Speaking of Fogel and his card-collecting habit, he doesn’t own the Wagner baseball card, but he does own the photo that was used as the master in order to create it.
Fogel got his hands on this specific Mantle card for $121,000 in 1996, a time when the bubble on sports memorabilia was finally bursting after a massive Dutch tulip rush that saw a baseball card shop in every small town in America and kids and adults alike buying up collectibles for pennies hoping to resell them for thousands of dollars.
But time marches on, and as the over-hopeful finally gave up on the folly, the laws of economics re-asserted themselves, and the market for true rarities found itself right back where it started, giving Fogel his 10,000 percent appreciation of his valuable.
As a point of reference, a ’52 Mantle carrying a PSA grade of 9 sold for $2.88 million earlier this year.
The curator of the exhibit, Jason Hanson, explained that the three-day window of display is less because of fear of theft or other catastrophe and more the mundane fear that the bright light in the room will fade the colors on the card, stripping it of its one-of-a-kind status.
Fogel, who is older than the Mantle card and who idolized the Yankees’ slugger as a kid, is no longer actively collecting new things, and his explanation why is a nice moral lesson for consumer-crazed times.
“I’m very satisfied with what I possess,” he said. “There’s got to be a point where you enjoy what you have.”
And as for the ultimate destination of the card — and the value it will command at auction — when Fogel finally passes on?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, I’m going to take it to heaven with me. It’s going to be laid across my chest in my casket.”
We can only assume Fogel’s joking, but if not, it should prove quite interesting to see what happens to the value of the other two ’52 Mantle cards in existence in PSA-10 condition.
After all, a 33-percent reduction in supply is one heck of a market mover.
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