On April 17, 1953, in the fifth inning at Griffith Stadium in Washington, Mantle hit a ball left-handed off Chuck Stobbs that cleared the left-field bleachers and left the park, which no one had managed since those bleachers went up in 1924. The Yankees’ press man, Red Patterson, went out and found the ball in a yard on Oakdale Place, worked the distance backward and announced 565 feet. Physicists have been arguing the figure down ever since. What the afternoon actually produced was a phrase that had not existed the day before: the tape-measure home run.
Bowman’s color set was on the counters that same season, and card 59 is the reason people call it the best-looking set anybody ever made. It is 160 cards, each 2 1/2 by 3 3/4 inches, and the front is a full-color photograph and nothing else. No name. No team, no position, no logo, no facsimile signature, no manufacturer’s line. The photograph runs to a white border and stops. This was the first set of active major leaguers printed from real color photography, and Bowman chose to put nothing on top of it.
No name, no team, no logo. The photograph runs to a white border and stops.
The restraint reads as confidence now; at the time it was also a reversal. Bowman had put the player’s name on its fronts in 1951 and kept it in 1952 as a facsimile signature laid across the picture. In 1953 it took the writing off again. And in those same months Topps was selling him as an oil painting with a red caption block underneath, name and position and team all spelled out. Two companies, one player, one summer, and opposite answers to whether a photograph needs explaining.
The pictures cost Bowman more than it could carry. It hired photographers away from the New York magazines and shot most of the set at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, and the color work came close to ruining the company. The set is small for the period at 160, and it is missing people: Ted Williams was flying in Korea, Willie Mays was under contract to Topps. Mantle appears twice — at 59 alone, and at 44 standing with Hank Bauer and Yogi Berra, among the first multi-player photographs in a major set since the nineteenth century.
Card 59 sits in the first series, 1 through 64, the easiest part of the checklist to find; the high numbers, 113 through 160, were printed last and in smaller quantities. But one problem runs through the whole set and 59 has it as badly as anything: centering. The images were laid down with very little margin for drift, so a card cut a fraction off true runs one border thin and the opposite border fat, and it announces itself instantly on a front with no type to distract the eye. Print lines and soft focus turn up as well. There is nowhere for any of it to hide.