Topps made its first full baseball set in 1952, and made it big. Four hundred and seven cards, each 2 5/8 by 3 3/4 inches, a good deal larger than anything Bowman was printing, with a color portrait, a team logo, the player’s name in a box and his signature printed under it. It came out in series through the summer. The last of them, numbers 311 through 407, reached the stores late, when the season was ending and boys had begun spending their nickels on football.
The order of that last series was Topps’s own decision, and it put Mickey Mantle first, at 311, and Jackie Robinson second, at 312. Mantle was twenty and had played one season. Robinson was thirty-three, five years past the afternoon he changed the game. They went to press together, side by side, in the smallest print run of the set.
Mantle was twenty and had played one season. Robinson was thirty-three. They went to press side by side.
What happened to the unsold high numbers has become part of the hobby’s folklore. Sy Berger, who ran the set for Topps, said decades later that in 1960 the company loaded its leftover 1952 cases onto a barge and dumped them in the Atlantic to clear the warehouse. Some of that may be true. Some of it may not — cards from the same series later turned up in quantity in Venezuela, where Topps had licensed sets. Either way the high numbers were short when they were printed, and they have stayed short.
The portrait is one of the best in the set. He is shown from the chest up with a bat resting on his shoulder, in a blue Brooklyn cap with the B, against a hot red background. Below him the Dodgers diamond and the name box, framed in a run of small stars, with the signature written across it in script. It is a confident card. Nothing in it is in a hurry.
The large size works against it. Big cards bend, and the corners of the 1952s took the knocks of rubber bands and back pockets. The high numbers have centering problems of their own, and the red ground shows a scrape or a print flaw the way snow shows a footprint. Most copies are a little off in one direction or another. A sharp, square one is uncommon in any grade.
