In 1998, a 1952 Topps card sold for $83,870 — believed at the time to be the second-highest price ever paid for a post-war baseball card.
No, it wasn’t a Mickey Mantle card.
It featured Andy Pafko.
As The Leader-Telegram reported 27 years ago, a collector paid $1,000 for an unopened pack of 1952 Topps cards and found the Pafko card inside, opting to sell it at auction. Pafko reportedly received a call from a friend after the auction, “Are you standing up or are you sitting down?”
“I hear some guy in California bought it,” Pafko told the paper. “I’d like to track him down and ask him why he bought it.”
The answer had nothing to do with Pafko’s excellent, but largely forgotten, major-league career. Instead, it’s due to the coincidence of his card being No. 1 in the famed set, and therefore the most likely to be exposed to damage when kept in numerical sets.
Many collectors kept the cards in order and wrapped in rubber bands, so as the first card in the set, Pafko cards always suffered in condition.
Only one PSA 10 copy of Pafko’s 1952 Topps card exists — the same one sold in 1998. That’s fewer than the three PSA 10 copies of Mantle’s 1952 Topps card in the PSA census, each of which would fetch millions if offered for sale today.
PSA has graded a total of 992 Pafko cards from the set, with just one receiving a 10 and no PSA 9s. There are six PSA 8 examples. The record price for the card was set in 2007, when Memory Lane sold one of the PSA 8 copies for more than $95,000.
There have only been three sales of PSA 8 examples in recent years, with Heritage selling one in 2015 for $52,580 and another in 2017 for $57,600.
The same PSA 8 that sold in 2017 is now on the auction block again at Heritage, with an estimate of $100,000. With more than a week remaining in the auction, bidding has reached $62,220, including buyer’s premium.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.