Why Mantle?

Why Mantle?

I’m gonna step on some hobby toes this week with my thinking on why Mickey Mantle has a much bigger hobby footprint than Ted Williams or Willie Mays. Mantle cards outsell theirs. Why?

The conventional thinking on the subject boils down to a few basic lines of reasoning:

--Mantle was a better player

--Mantle was a Yankee

--Mantle played in New York City

--Mantle was on TV more

--Mantle was white (at least as it pertains to Mays)

--Mantle was both more accessible and nicer to hobbyists than the others

Some of these theories are silly, others are untestable but logical. I think that the biggest explanation of all is missing from the usual discussion.

Let’s start with the silliest, worst canard, that Mantle’s cards are more expensive because he was a better player than Mays or Williams. Fortunately, this is one hypothesis we can test. For purposes of testing this I am going to use peak WAR per 162 games as calculated by Baseball Reference. Why peak WAR per 162? To eliminate the effects of both cumulative stats due to longevity (Mantle effectively drank himself out of his career by age 33 and was finished at 36; both Mays and Williams played past 40) and longer seasons after 1961, which weakened pitching staffs due to expansion and provided more plate appearances to drive up the counting stats for Mantle and Mays. It also eliminates the effect of two stints in the military on Williams’ career and one on Mays’ career. Here are the numbers:

Mantle: 7.4

Williams: 8.6

Mays: 8.4

Objectively speaking, Mays and Williams were clearly superior players. So much for the on-field performance argument; it is pure horseshit.

I cannot resist throwing out one more peak WAR/162 for perspective: 10.5. That number belongs to Babe Ruth. If performance on the field and celebrity status truly was the driver of card pricing, I would expect that Ruth’s cards would carry an even larger premium relative to his contemporaries’ cards than Mantle’s do because he was significantly better than his peers by a larger margin than Mantle, and while Ruth cards do carry a premium compared to Gehrig or Cobb, it is not to the degree that some of Mantle’s issues top those of Mays and Williams. Clearly, something else is going on here.

The Yankee Mystique. Mantle was the superstar player on the team that had a book written about it (by Peter Golenbock) called “Dynasty”, and it was the closest thing to a dynasty that we are likely to see. Mantle was the superstar successor to a string of superstars going back to Ruth; DiMaggio’s last season coincided with Mantle’s first so it was a perfect hand-off. I do not dispute the existence of Yankee Mystique, and that it positively affects the card values of the truly great players who have worn pinstripes. My father, who was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and hated the Yankees fervently, nevertheless always recounted to me that he saw Babe Ruth walking down Park Avenue in New York City, and rapturously told how Babe nodded hello to him. If he was impressed by a Yankee, I am convinced that Yankee Mystique cannot be overlooked as a factor in Mantle’s card values, but not the key factor.

Television. I agree that the idiot box was critical to presenting Mantle to a greater swath of Americans in person and live than with any prior generation of ballplayers. From 1951-1964, Mantle’s Yankees were in the World Series 12 times. For our purposes that is less important in and of itself than when these games were played. Mantle’s post-season career happened to coincide with the advent of national broadcasts of the Series. In 1951, his first series, NBC broadcast the games nationwide for the first time. Over the Mantle years the Yankees were in the Series twelve times, and while his batting average was meh, he had pop: by the time his era closed out he had the record for most homers in World Series play, a record he still holds. Mantle took the equivalent of a half-season of at-bats on national TV, so casual fans got to know him very well from his nearly annual fall appearances. Visibility matters: ask Ernie Banks or Al Kaline fans, if you can find any (I kid the Banks and Kaline fan, er, fans). However, as the generations who remember Mantle as a player age out of the hobby or otherwise attrit (die), any halo effect for Mantle from seeing him on TV should dissipate relative to other great players like Mays and Williams. I do not think we are there yet. Those of us who were the little brothers or younger cousins or nephews of the Mantle fanatics were spoon-fed Mantle worship as little kids and I expect that will cause the halo to linger. Twenty years from now, as we attrit out, however, Mantle will be more like Ruth, Gehrig and DiMaggio: iconic but not immediate. Will that affect his card prices? I hope to be alive to find out.

New York City. The premiere city of the 20th Century. Certainly, Mantle benefitted from the spotlight of New York City. However, Mays played there too, from 1951-1957, and had his most triumphant season (1954: MVP and World Series title; The Catch) in New York City. If New York had an effect, why do we not see it on Mays? For that, we have to acknowledge the last and thorniest issue, race. Does race play a role in Mantle’s hobby ascendency over Mays? Perhaps, but I do not believe it is the role that many think of when answering the question, and I think it will be a less influential one over time. I will explain.

I will not pretend to understand what it was like in the 18 or so years between Jackie Robinson stepping onto the field in Brooklyn and the signing of the main civil rights laws in 1964-65 that eliminated Jim Crow and forced open every door in every American city. I understand that someone raised in the 1940s or 1950s might not ‘see’ a black player the way my generation does; white American society’s ability to ignore black men is the essential premise of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel The Invisible Man. I won’t accuse those people of racism; I do not know what was in their hearts. I will say that it was just a lot easier for white people to ignore everyone else before integration became the law of the land. After all, it took until 1959 to fully integrate the Major Leagues, and many teams integrated reluctantly, with a token player or two. The Yankees, for example, did not put a black guy on the roster (Elston Howard) until eight years after the sport integrated. They even passed on Willie Mays when they had the chance to sign him. For many years after Robinson’s debut, white fans in some cities could largely pretend that the game was still segregated. We cannot ignore how that kind of mentality affected the visibility of Mays.

All that said, I think that the effects of race are dying out. My generation (X) was raised with integrated life and integrated baseball. I idolized Willie Mays as a kid and went on a quest as a tween to collect every Topps Mays card. My friend Michael idolized Roberto Clemente and did the same with him. In 1973, I was really excited to hear that the great Willie Mays was going to be a New York Met. I remember a poster from the New York Daily News that was handed out to kids in school and it stayed on my closet door for years. I even got to see him play once, in my first visit to a ballpark, when my uncle took me to Shea Stadium. I collected all of Mays’s cards, culminating in the 1952 and 1953 Topps cards that I bought at the 1976 American Sports Card Collectors Association’s annual show in New York at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was my first card show. My father had to lend me $45 to make the deal, which freaked out my mother when she heard about it. The point is that my generation and those who’ve come since literally did not notice the race of these men, but in the good sense of not allowing race to tarnish our views of our heroes. I think that generational about-face in perspectives has diminished the race effect of Mantle’s whiteness on his hobby status, to the extent it was there to begin with, and will continue to do so as a greater percentage of white collectors who do not ‘see’ black players diminishes.

When it comes to hobby status, I have to believe that the way these men behaved towards the hobby has a role in how their cards are valued. Fast-forward some years and I am finally going to meet Mays at a show. I had a baseball signed by Snider and Mantle and I was going to get Mays’ signature to finish it. I don’t recall what I said to Mays, exactly, but I do recall that he never even acknowledged my presence or my heartfelt words of adulation. Just robotically scrawled his name and rolled—ROLLED, with a flip like he was shooing a fly—the ball across the table to a handler, who handed it to me. I was crestfallen. The whole experience left such a bad taste in my mouth that I sold off my Mays cards and swore off having any more of them until a few years ago. So I know, from personal experience, that a player’s treatment of fans at hobby events can make or break attitudes towards collecting the player. I’ve since rescinded my anti-Mays edict, though not soon enough to make me come out of pocket for some of his earlier cards. Obviously, my story is personal, and I do not think that hobby behavior is more than a small factor in overall card prices, but I think it is there.

Since none of these theories works particularly well to explain the ongoing Mantle thing, there has to be something else. My pet theory is that while many of these factors have a role in Mantle’s value (except the quality of play, which should push people away from Mantle and towards Mays and Williams), the overriding factor in Mantle’s hobby status is Mantle’s presence in the high number series of 1952 Topps. PSA puts it well in its introduction to the 1952 Topps set on the registry:

“This set is regarded today as the "Holy Grail" of modern day cards, in fact it is often compared to T-206 White Borders and 1933 Goudey when the topic of conversation evolves around the greatest card set ever produced. As time goes by and new generations of collectors enter the hobby, the stature of the 1952 set continues to grow. The same can be said of card #311 Mickey Mantle, perhaps the most recognized card in the world today with the exception of the T-206 Wagner.”

I agree. In 1952 Topps created the modern baseball card: large size with team logos and player stats on the back. When anyone thinks “baseball card”, that is what they think of as the essentials. My favorite “what if” is what if Mays had been card #311 and Mantle had been card #261? Would the Mays card have garnered the extreme stature of the Mantle? I suspect the two cards would be much closer in value had that been the case. The legend of the 1952 Topps high numbers is decades old and has grown over the years. By 1975, for example, Topps executive Sy Berger was telling the story that much of the print run of the set was dumped in the harbor off a garbage scow. Thanks to the good work of researchers like David Hornish (thetoppsarchives.com), that story has been debunked, but the story is so good and so old that it has legs independent of the facts. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. As Dave points out, there was also a fire at the Card Collectors Company, which was essentially a dumping grounds for Topps’ excess inventory courtesy of Woody Gelman’s connection to Topps. CCC, by its own admission, actively hoarded 1952 Mantles at the time of the fire, so it is possible that a good number of 1952 Mantle cards were incinerated.

The result of the 1952 Topps legend is that if you speak with a non-collector, there are two cards they know and will ask you if you have: “the Wagner” and “that Mantle”, and you know exactly which ones they mean. The 1952 Mantle has transcended the hobby as only the T206 Wagner has done. Putting this in perspective, a low grade but essentially intact 1933 Goudey Ruth or T206 Cobb red portrait will cost you about $5,000 or less; a destroyed 1952 Topps Mantle will sell for $15,000 or more even if it looks like it went through the washing machine.

Now, how does the stature of #311 translate to other Topps and Bowman mainstream Mantle cards? A few ways, I think. First, can we all agree that none of these cards are rare and that scarcity per se is not the driving force? 1952 Topps high numbers are not abundant but they are readily available in this era of extreme connectivity. Even Mantle can be purchased every day of the week if you have the cash. That was not always the case. In the late 1970s on the West Coast, for example, I do not recall seeing many 1952 Topps high number cards at card shows. I don’t think a lot of them made it out to Los Angeles. I rarely saw a Mantle. Today, I see multiple 1952 Mantles at every show I attend. The 1952 Mantle has grown and grown in status even as it has become easier than ever to get one, to the point where picking up one of them becomes the highlight acquisition of a collecting career for many of us. His other cards are experiencing a spill-over from that, I think, because the consciousness of “the Mantle” whets new collectors’ appetites for having “a Mantle”. That helps push up the demand for other Mantle cards. Economic replacement theory at its best.

Another factor in the Mantle pricing phenomenon is that card prices on marquee cards are notoriously sticky upward, meaning that prices do not go down very often or very far, unless they were run up steeply first. Most collectors who go after marquee cards do not need to flip their purchases, so if prices are stable or negative, they hold on, while if prices spike, they may be tempted to jump in and sell. There is also a significant percentage of collectors who are on budgets and who have perhaps a Mantle or two from a later year at the cores of their collections; you think those collectors are going to sell their Mantles on the cheap?

Some people think there is a cabal of investors who support card prices, and I think that may be true for certain common issues, and especially modern cards, but there is 50+ year track record of tremendous price increases on Mantle. Given that time frame, I do not think that The Mantle is a victim of a pump-and-dump scheme, unless Methuselah is running it.

While batting this around is great fun, we will never have a definitive answer as to why Mantle cards, and especially the 1952 Topps, command such a premium, any more than the babbling idiots on CNBC ‘know’ why the stock market went up or down. But it is fun to speculate. Now, if I can just get a spot on TV to be a babbling idiot.