The morning after an autographed Mickey Mantle 1952 Topps card sold for a record $793,000 last month, collector Matt Cirulnick woke up to messages from friends, acquaintances and industry professionals.
They knew what this meant for him.
He wasn’t the seller. Nor the buyer.
But he was the owner of one of the other 20 signed examples of the Mantle card graded by PSA — a group which has seen its value surge in recent years as the hobby began to embrace signed vintage cards, once considered taboo.
Similar to how population reports differentiate cards based on grades (and rank them in tiers), the rarity of signed cards brings another aspect for collectors searching for significant and hard-to-find pieces.
Cirulnick, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter, is maniacally focused on finding rarity beyond the simplistic population reports determined by third-party authenticators.
“To me, it’s all about collecting challenges,” Cirulnick told cllct. “The first hurdle was trying to find a dead-centered ’52 Mantle.”
Centering, one of the key metrics for determining the condition of a card, along with edges, corners and surface, is the most important attribute to Cirulnick. But since graders use other factors to determine grades and are subjective in their standards, Cirulnick decided to go through every single ’52 Topps Mantle that had ever sold publicly, from PSA 9s down to 5s, in order to gauge the rarity of centering.
“After I found one, I just thought ‘What's another great challenge?’ It would be to find one that was signed by him,” Cirulnick said. “So, then I dug into how many exist. How rare is it? And there were 19 (now 20).”
Out of the 2,867 examples of the 1952 Topps Mantle graded by third-party authenticators, less than 0.7% are signed. There are more PSA 8 examples (35) than autographed copies. The last PSA 8 sale notched $1.38 million.
Duane Tom, who purchased the record-setting autographed Mantle along with two friends, Kyle Wilkins and Mark Tanaka, has a collection of every Hall Of Fame rookie card signed by the player. Much like Cirulnick, it’s the extreme rarity and the chase that draws him to the signed vintage world.
“This card is so iconic, and everybody wants it. … We decided we really needed to chase this thing down and get it, because it's already run up, but it hasn't stopped going,” Tom said. “There's a lot of gas left in that tank, so to speak.”
Cirulnick wasn’t satisfied even with the rarified air of the 20 signed Mantles.
“Then I said the holy grail for autographed card collectors is one that was signed when he was a Yankee during his playing days.”
He wasn’t even sure one existed at the time.
That’s when Cirulnick went back and looked at sales archives. He knew he could eliminate sharpie-signed cards as those were indicative of Mantle’s days on the card show circuit. Soon, he had found one.
The only one encapsulated by PSA.
A Forbes article from 2017 reported the story of a man named Steve Olsen, who had consigned an autographed 1952 Topps Mantle and a 1951 Bowman Mantle to Heritage Auctions. The 1952 Topps card stuck out to Cirulnick, as it was the only he had ever seen with the inscription, “Best Wishes.”
Unlike the other 19 PSA-graded signed 1952 Topps Mantle cards, which were almost certainly signed after his playing days, at card shows and other events, this one came with provenance.
Olsen had traveled to a Yankees spring training game in Sarasota, Florida, in 1968 — the final season of Mantle’s career, to obtain his autograph. With help from a friend, who had a connection to Yankees pitcher Steve Hamilton, Olsen was able to arrange a meeting with Mantle.
“Olsen brought his two Mantle cards in an envelope. They cost him a penny apiece because he plucked them from wax packs as a boy,” Forbes reported.
Mantle signed both cards with his “distinctive looping Ms,” a style he used prior to retirement and the subsequent autograph circuit. He then added “Best Wishes,” a sign-off possibly indicative of his appreciation for Olsen, an assistant basketball coach, as Mantle had fond memories of his own youth coaches.
Beyond the rarity of an autograph from the Hall of Famer's playing days, the signature itself tells a story.
Steve Grad, Beckett’s lead authenticator and a longtime industry veteran, says Mantle rarely included “Best Wishes” on signatures from the era.
“When I look at it, he respectfully signed it,” Grad said. “This wasn't a card show where you're just going up and putting your card up there. … I feel that when I see it, especially because he didn’t cover his face.”
Grad says once Mantle hit the autograph show circuit, he became a “machine,” likening it to a mechanical operation. But in the '60s, Grad thinks Mantle enjoyed signing his name and took pride in it. The differences between early autographs and post-career signatures have telltale signs, with the former appearing more free-flowing.
“They just had a different flair to it,” Grad says.
The two signed cards obtained by Olsen were nearly lost forever, as a large quantity of his collection was stolen by his son and his friend. As if that wasn’t enough, his remaining collection was nearly wiped out by a fire and then a subsequent flood.
He lost “24 1954 Hank Aaron rookies, five or six 1952 Topps Willie Mays, many Ted Williams from all years (and) 14 complete 1954 Topps sets,” according to Forbes. His two signed Mantles were spared, however, as he kept them in a “safe place.”
“I can't believe that this could be the first ‘52 mantle he ever signed,” Cirulnick recalled thinking after reading the article. “There were no baseball card circuits to go to shows to get him to sign … you would have had to carry around the ’52 Mantle, and then you'd have to somehow know you were meeting the most famous athlete in the country to get him to sign it. How would that have happened?”
Cirulnick had to have it.
“This is the only one for me,” he said, explaining that while PSA might deem the card a lower grade than others, the story and provenance “transcends authentication.”
But Cirulnick ended up as the under bidder in the 2017 auction, which closed at $48,000. “I thought I had lost it forever,” Cirulnick said.
Considering the rarity, it was a reasonable conclusion.
Signed vintage cards, especially those as valuable as the ’52 Mantle, are among the scarcest finds in the hobby.
“Throughout the '80s and '90s, it was like, ‘Oh, you can't get rookie signed. Those are too valuable. Why would you ever get that card signed?’” Grad said.
Then, it surfaced again, this time at the 2023 National Sports Collectors Convention. Cirulnick, who was in Europe at the time, got a call from a representative at Heritage who knew he had been hunting the card.
Cirulnick went back and conducted further research, picking up an original spring training schedule from that year and used it to pinpoint the day it was signed: Friday, March 29, 1968.
“It's the only one where we know that date,” he said. “So, that just f---ing blew me away.”
The story even extends to the placement of the autograph itself, which is situated vertically along the card rather than the more common left-to-right orientation.
“When you look at where he signed it, it’s as if you could see him figuring out where to do it,” Cirulnick said.
The price had ballooned by then and the owner was asking $225,000 — but Cirulnick says they didn’t seem to be aware of its provenance. While in rural Sweden, he worked out a deal thousands of miles away with the owner, arriving at a price of $200,000.
“So, the deal got done on the phone, my heart beating, racing, trying to close the deal while it was on display at the National," he said.
Cirulnick is also still after the other Mantle consigned in that 2017 Heritage sale, as evidenced by his repeated offers (all of which have been rejected). “The owner’s not selling,” the auction house told him.
The fate of Cirulnick’s white whale is in good hands, as he has made sure to have a serious conversation with his teenage son to make sure he wouldn’t sell the card.
“He’s like ‘Dad, why do you care so much about this?’”
It’s easy to tell why he cares so much about the card. All it takes is a few minutes listening to him to describe the intricacies of the story and the excitement of his research to grasp his passion.
Where most collectors’ end their research at pop reports, Cirulnick’s drive to find stories behind his collectibles makes him an outlier. When asked if he thought his background as a writer contributed to this disposition, he dismissed it.
“The reason I crave the story isn't just because of what I do for a living,” he said. “I think with our sports in this country, we clearly love those narratives and stories. And then there's that extra story. It just creates a gravitas that accompanies it forever."
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.