It’s always a good thing when our beloved hobby gets national media attention. Today on ESPN.com, and I would assume other media outlets as well, the 1951 Mickey Mantle Bowman SGC 96 rookie card that sold in Mastro’s recent auction was featured in a story.
The price of $160K was the most ever for a Mint example of Mantle’s true rookie card.
I am not going lie; I was very baffled when I saw the final price. Granted it was graded by SGC, and not PSA, but PSA has graded 9 1951 Bowman Mantles with a grade of a Mint 9, so it’s not like cards similar to this one don’t exist.

Also, the ones that have previously sold went for only about a third as this one did.
Was this because the card was once owned by hobby veteran Lionel Carter? Was it just a better example than all the previously-sold 9s? I have no clue.

That raises an important question. Does it make a big difference if a notable person once owned a particular item? I remember when SCD Authentic graded cards from Larry Fritsch’s collection, and they did rather well, but three times the normal price? That is very surprising.
I wonder if it will end up in a PSA Gem 10 holder some day.

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Now on to the NFL Draft. If you read my post last Friday you could probably sense the excitement I felt from the Packers’ potential on really improving the team. Instead, they made no significant trades and drafted a bunch of players I never heard of.

I am not one to doubt a General Manager of a pro football team, but I will admit that Ted Thompson’s strategy is very baffling at times.

There are people in Wisconsin that are calling for his head right now. I will wait and see how this all plays out before I go looking for him.

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I will be headed to Dallas this Friday and I am very excited to tell everyone that I will be covering Heritage’s live auction. I will be writing a story covering the event for the pages of Sports Collectors Digest and also will be taking some video and doing some audio interviews with the hobby’s key players.

I am going to most likely be talking to Heritage’s auction director Chris Ivy and Heritage’s jersey authenticator and hobby pioneer Lou Lampson.

Should be very interesting content to say the least.