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This one’s outta here!
A Mickey Mantle baseball card sold for a record-smashing $12.6 million Sunday, the highest price ever paid for a piece of sports memorabilia.
The 1952 Mantle rookie card, which was in mint condition and received an astounding 9.5 grade from grader SGC, was last sold in 1991 for $50,000 by the famed baseball-card collector Alan Rosen.
In a letter to the buyer accompanying the sale, Rosen wrote that the card was “in my estimation the finest known example in the world,” noting its perfect centering and color, with only the “slightest evidence of paper toning.”
The auction house had predicted the card would fetch more than $10 million.
Chris Ivy, Heritage’s director of sports auctions, wrote in a July statement that the piece of memorabilia’s exceptional SGC grade, “plus the fact it has documented provenance from the most storied find in hobby history, puts this card in a category of its own.
