Five 1952 Mantle cards discovered in collection

Most people who collect sports cards when they are kids usually end up storing them in boxes for years and years. That’s where they stay until something prompts the desire to go through them.

For a 76-year-old man from New Jersey who asked to be identified only by his first name, John, it was seeing an ad in a newspaper earlier this year for a 1952 Mickey Mantle card being sold by Heritage Auctions with an estimated value of $3.5 million.

At first, he was sure the listed price was an error. “I told my daughter, ‘This is going to be interesting. Tomorrow’s New York Times, they’re going to print they had a typo and they had an extra zero in it,’” John told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “I really thought they had made a terrible mistake.”

When he didn’t see a correction the following day, he began looking through the collection he jointly owns with his older brother, Ed. And when he saw the card sold by former NFL lineman Evan Mathis went for $2.88 million, that’s when John decided to call Heritage to have them evaluate his cards.

As it turns out, their collection includes five Mantle Topps cards from 1952, similar to the one Mathis sold. However, that card was graded a Mint 9 by PSA, one of the leading sports memorabilia authenticators. The best in the brothers’ collection is a PSA 8.5 valued at $1 million by Heritage and is part of its Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction that runs through Aug. 19.

John recalled he and his brother began collecting cards in 1951 when they were growing up in West Hartford, Conn. John was 9 at the time, and Ed was 12, and they each had separate collections that got merged at some point when they were being stored. Their cards are from 1951 and 1952.

“We didn’t save anything after that, from 1953,” John said. “I guess my brother sort of outgrew it, and as the big brother stopped saving cards the little brother apparently did as well.”

There was a big attic in their house and John said a lot of things were stored there over the years after they were no longer being used, including his Cub Scout uniform and his Army uniforms. At some point the cards went up there, too.

.The brothers’ collection is doing well at auction. There were 26 cards sold in Heritage’s auction in July for a total of $384,000. The current auction has six cards from their collection, including the Mantle PSA 8.5, and their final two Mantle cards — a PSA 7 estimated at $100,000 and another PSA 5 estimated at $40,000 — will be part of an offering in the fall.