Mutt Mantle died on May 6, 1952, at forty, of Hodgkin’s disease, in the middle of his son’s second season. Mickey went back to work. Joe DiMaggio had retired over the winter, so center field in New York belonged to the twenty-year-old, and he played 142 games there that year and batted .311 with 23 home runs and 87 runs batted in. Those are the numbers printed on the back of this card. Topps put the 1952 line and the short career line on every 1953 reverse, so what a boy read in a candy store the following spring was, without knowing it, the record of the season Mantle played after burying his father.
The 1953 set is the one people mean when they say Topps used to paint its cards. Two hundred and eighty numbers were assigned and 274 were issued, each card 2 5/8 by 3 3/4 inches — the same large format as the year before. The portraits are oil paintings, commissioned from artists and worked from contemporary photographs; Gerry Dvorak painted a great many of them. Beneath the portrait sits a colored caption block with name, position and team, red for the American League and black for the National, and a team emblem set into a shape beside it.
The portraits are oil paintings, commissioned from artists and worked from contemporary photographs.
Mantle is at 82, in the earliest run, well clear of the trouble at the back of the set. The final series, 221 through 280, shipped late and thin; Willie Mays sits in it at 244. Six of those late numbers were never printed at all — 253, 261, 267, 268, 271 and 275 — because Topps had been racing to sign players out of Bowman contracts and did not get them in hand in time. The gaps are still in the checklist. A set collector finishing 1953 finishes at 274.
The reverse is unusually crowded for its year. It gives the player’s full given name rather than what anyone called him, a paragraph of write-up, batting and fielding figures, a facsimile signature in red ink, and a Dugout Quiz — a trivia question with a small cartoon beside it. It is a card built to be read as well as looked at, which was a newer idea then than it sounds now.
The painting is the interesting part, because it was already being overtaken as it was printed. In the same summer Bowman was selling him as a color photograph, with no artist standing between the camera and the card, and by 1957 Topps had given up painting and gone to color photography for good. The object’s weakness follows from its design. Mantle’s caption block is red, and red over white stock chips at the slightest contact, so a handled card shows white specks along the bottom color. Centering is the other trouble, and print flecks in the paint matter here more than most, because when one lands on the face it is the first thing the eye finds.