Exploring Mickey Mantle magazine cards
In 1954, there was a new kid on the block in the American sports magazine world. That new kid would turn out to be the most popular sports magazine on the planet, Sports Illustrated. In its inaugural issue, SI publisher Henry Luce decided to include 27 1954 Topps baseball cards that would prove to be a hit with fellow baseball card collectors. It would mark the first time in a long time that baseball cards would appear in a weekly periodical.
In the past, cards were issued in tobacco and candy products. They also appeared in loaves of bread. Earlier in the same year, they even appeared in packages of hot dogs and were available through a wrapper redemption program by Red Heart Dog Food. So why not magazines? After all, the idea had already proven to be successful with the Sporting Life and Baseball Magazine.
In that inaugural issue, paper-thin cards of Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Duke Snider, and Eddie Mathews, who graced that August 16, 1954, cover, could all be found. It was a decision made by Topps and Sports Illustrated that would not only boost sales of the new magazine but would also prove to be very popular with collectors even today.
To further entice fans to purchase Sports Illustrated, 27 more cards were included in issue No. 2. This gave Yankee fans the opportunity to see what a 1954 Mickey Mantle Topps card would have looked like, had Mickey not been under an exclusive contract with rival Bowman.
As it turned out, it was a win-win situation for both Topps and Sports Illustrated. The magazine had come out of the block with two top-flight issues and the baseball card collectors were equally pleased, as it filled a void in their Mickey Mantle and New York Yankee collections.
Now granted, collecting baseball cards may not have been as popular back then. It was a hobby that was supposed to be only for kids, but we know better. Even today, those first two issues of SI are the most coveted issues in its long run of 66 years, and SI can boast of a circulation over 3.26 million.
As time went on, other magazines would also include baseball cards and postcards in their publications. In fact, one could say that in the early to mid-1990s, when card collecting had reached unimaginable levels, there was a myriad of collector magazines and price guides that included those cardboard relics on a regular basis. Eventually Major League Baseball would shut down most of these secondary publications because of copyright infringement violations and the use of unauthorized photos.
In this article, I’ll be cataloguing the various Mickey Mantle collectibles that made their way into the collecting hobby via the magazine.
1. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, ISSUE 2, AUGUST 23, 1954
As described above, the second issue of , which showed a less than exciting photo of a bunch of colorful golf bags,
