Willie Mays came up to the Giants in late May of 1951 and went hitless in his first twelve times at bat. His first hit, when it came, was a home run off Warren Spahn at the Polo Grounds. He finished the year at .274 with 20 home runs, the Giants won the pennant, and he was named the National League's Rookie of the Year. His rookie card is the 1951 Bowman. This is his first Topps.
It belongs to the set collectors still measure the others against. Sy Berger and Woody Gelman laid out the 1952 Topps design at a Brooklyn kitchen table in the autumn of 1951: a colorized portrait, the team logo, a facsimile signature, and on the back the player's statistics and a short biography. The cards were large, 2 5/8 by 3 3/4 inches, and there were 407 of them, released in six series from the spring into the fall.
The 1952 Topps set is the one collectors still measure the others against. This is the first Willie Mays in it.
Mays is number 261. The portrait is a young man with a stern expression, glancing past the photographer, and his name and signature sit in a nameplate at the bottom bordered by yellow stars, with the Giants name above its corner. The back runs sideways, with his personal details across the top, a short write-up in the middle and his statistics below, and it notes the Rookie of the Year award in red and black.
The fifth series, numbers 251 through 310, was printed in shorter supply than the early ones, though not as short as the sixth, the high numbers from 311 to 407 that hold the Mantle. So #261 is a semi-high number: scarcer than the first half of the set, well short of its rarest part.
The 1952 season gave him only thirty-four games. He hit .236, and on May 29 he was inducted into the Army. He spent the rest of that year, and all of the next, at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and did not play another major league game until 1954.
Centering is the first problem in the 1952 set and the first thing to check on this card. Worn corners, creases and surface wear are common, and copies with sharp corners are the exception.
