If you saved your old baseball cards, and didn't beat them up, you may just beat Bidenflation.
A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card in mint condition sold for $12.6 million Saturday night by Heritage Auctions, setting a record as the most ever paid for sports memorabilia.
The card, graded at 9.5 by SGC, was purchased by the consignor for $50,000 in 1991.
The highest previous sale for a 1952 Topps Mantle was one graded a PSA 9, which sold to entrepreneur Rob Gough for $5.2 million in January 2021.
"The 1952 Mantle, card No. 311, was part of the first set Topps made to promote its chewing gum. It is partly more scarce because, after eight years of trying to get rid of cards from that set, Topps dumped them off a barge in the Atlantic Ocean," Darren Rovell of Action Network noted in an Aug. 28 report.
Other big ticket items in the Heritage Auctions event on Saturday: $1.2 million for a 1979 Wayne Gretzky Topps rookie graded at PSA 10; $120,000 for UNC Converse shoes used by Michael Jordan; $78,000 for a signed Michael Jordan debut ticket; and $297,000 collectively for Horace Grant’s three Bulls NBA championship rings.
And one item that proves just how hot sports memorabilia is at the moment: The ticket for the last plane ride John Madden ever took before deciding he would never go on one again sold for $11,400.
The rare Mantle card eclipsed the record that was set just a few months ago — $9.3 million for the jersey worn by Diego Maradona when he scored the contentious “Hand of God” goal in soccer’s 1986 World Cup.
The previous record for a baseball card was $7.25 million for a century-old Honus Wagner card.
Just last month, the heavyweight boxing belt reclaimed by Muhammad Ali during 1974′s “Rumble in the Jungle” sold for nearly $6.2 million.
The research firm Market Decipher predicts the sports memorabilia market will grow to $227 billion within a decade.
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