A baseball card sold for more than $12 million at auction, making it both the most valuable sports card and the most expensive piece of sports memorabilia ever sold at auction.
The Mickey Mantle baseball card from 1952 was graded a Mint+ 9.5 by Sportscard Guaranty Corporation, and was sold by Heritage Auctions for $12.6 million at 12:28 a.m. CST, on Aug. 28, according to a
press release from the Dallas, Texas-based auction house.
Its sale price far outweighs the previous record for a baseball card set by the T206 Honus Wagner, which sold for $6.6 million last year.
It also far surpasses the record for any item of sports memorabilia, which was previously set with the
$9.3 million sale of Diego Maradona’s famous “Hand of God” jersey earlier this year.
The card sold during the first session of the auction house’s Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction, which ran from Aug. 27 to Aug. 28.
It was first purchased by an individual named Anthony Giordano in 1991 from a hobby pioneer, Sports Collectors Digest
reports. Mantle had been Giordano’s favorite baseball player growing up in New York City. He purchased the card for $50,000 and kept it stashed safely for three decades before deciding to put it up for auction.
“An eight-figure auction result in the sports market was the stuff of fantasy just a decade ago,” says Chris Ivy, director of Sports Auctions at Heritage. “We always knew this card would shatter records and expectations. But that doesn’t make it any less of a thrill to be part of an auction during which a single item breaks the eight-figure threshold for the first time.”
“A True Miracle”
The card was in mint condition making it more valuable.“It bears the finest qualities any 1952 Topps can possess: perfect centering, registration, and four sharp corners,” Ivy said. “That this Mantle rookie card remained in this condition for 70 years is a true miracle.”
Mantle spent his entire
17-year career playing for the New York Yankees, from 1951 to 1968, and was a seven-time World Series champion. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974, and died in 1995.
The record-breaking card was produced by U.S. manufacturer and cardmaker Topps.
The card has generated so much interest that Emmy Award-winning director Dan Klein is working on a documentary about it, with the working title set as “Four Perfect Corners,” Heritage Auctions
said. Sunday’s record-breaking auction sale comes as the sports memorabilia market is booming.
A July
report by the market research and consultancy firm Market Decipher calculated the size of the sports memorabilia market at $26 billion in 2021, and researchers forecast that it will reach $227.2 billion by 2032.
The report noted that a string of factors, such as the increasing wealth of baby boomers, more millennials in the market, and the rising interest from foreign buyers, has pushed prices further in recent years.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sports memorabilia market was estimated at more than $5.4 billion, according to a 2018
Forbes interview with David Yoken, the founder of Collectable.com.
