Topps Was Still Selling the Cards It Had Supposedly Dumped at Sea

Every collector hears this one eventually. Around 1960, Topps had warehouses of unsold 1952 high-number cards nobody wanted. Sy Berger, the man who designed the set, had them loaded onto a garbage barge, towed a few miles off New York and tipped into the Atlantic. He said he was aboard and watched it happen.

The quantity gets told two ways: three garbage trucks' worth in one version, around two million cards in another. Among them were the 97 cards numbered 311 to 407, and the first of those is Mickey Mantle.

It is a good story and it does useful work. It explains in one sentence why the back end of the most famous set in the hobby is harder to find than the front. I have repeated it myself.

I no longer think it is what happened.

What is actually established

Start with the parts nobody disputes.

Berger co-designed the 1952 set with Woody Gelman in the autumn of 1951, at his kitchen table in Brooklyn. He was twenty-eight. He stayed at Topps until 1997 and then consulted for another five years, which is to say he was the institutional memory of American card collecting for half a century.

The high numbers arrived late and sold badly. They went out in their own small packs, distribution was patchy, and the cards reached New York, Pennsylvania and Toronto well before they reached the west coast - in some places months later, by which time the baseball season was over and football had the shelf space. Topps was improvising a release plan on the back half of a set that had stopped selling.

So there was surplus. That part is certain. What happened to the surplus is the question.

The detail that does not fit

The Card Collectors Company operated out of New York, close to Topps, and sold cards by mail. It was not a stranger to the company; Woody Gelman, Berger's co-designer, was behind it.

It was selling 1952 high-number singles, and complete runs of the high series, through at least 1968.

That is eight years after the barge supposedly sailed. You cannot fill mail orders for complete high-number runs for most of a decade out of stock that is sitting on the seabed. Either the dumping was far smaller than the telling, or it happened later than 1960, or it did not happen.

There is a second practical objection, and it is the one that bothers me most. Topps had an incinerator available at Bush Terminal. Burning cardboard you own is free; renting a barge and a tug to carry it out to sea is not. A company that wanted rid of paper had a cheaper way to do it on its own premises.

The two other accounts

Neither of these is nailed down either, and I want to be straight about that.

The first is Venezuela. Topps licensed card printing there from 1959 to 1968, which gave it a route for surplus product rather than a disposal problem. When dealers started buying up Venezuelan stock in the mid-1980s, 1952 high numbers came back with it. That is suggestive, not conclusive.

The second is a fire. The Card Collectors Company is reported to have burned in 1975, and whatever remained of the high-number backlog would have gone with it. If that is right, the cards did get destroyed - just fifteen years later than the story says, in a building rather than an ocean, and by accident.

There is also a date problem with the story itself. Berger does not appear to have told it at the time. The accounts put his first telling somewhere between 1975 and the early 1980s, which is twenty years or more after the event he was describing, and in the window when the hobby was becoming a business with a history worth having.

What the population report says

This is where we can actually contribute something rather than weigh other people's accounts.

If a single catastrophic event removed the high numbers from the world, the surviving population should show a cliff at card 311. There should be a visible break between the cards that escaped and the cards that did not.

There is no cliff. There is a slope, and it starts at card 1.

Averaged across every card in each series, the copies PSA has graded run like this:

• Cards 1 to 80, the first series: 885 copies per card
• Cards 81 to 250: 698 per card
• Cards 251 to 310: 597 per card
• Cards 311 to 407, the high numbers: 538 per card

Each series survives a little worse than the one before it. The largest single drop is not at 311 at all - it is between the first series and the second, where the figure falls by 21 per cent. From there it falls another 14 per cent, then another 10. The high numbers are the thin end of a taper, not the victims of an event.

In total the high series is 23.8 per cent of the cards in the set and 18.8 per cent of the graded copies. A card numbered above 310 survives at roughly 61 per cent of the rate of a card from the first series. That is a real difference and it is worth knowing. It is not the difference you would expect if two million of them had been destroyed.

The shape fits the distribution story exactly. Every series shipped to fewer shops, later in the season, to a shrinking number of interested children.

The part that surprised me

The high numbers do not just survive in reasonable quantity. They survive in better condition than the rest of the set.

PSA has awarded 94 tens across all 277,508 copies of this set it has graded - a rate of 0.034 per cent, which tells you what sixty-year-old cardboard with hand-cut edges is like. But the rate is not even across the set:

• Cards 1 to 80: eleven tens, 0.016 per cent
• Cards 81 to 250: thirty tens, 0.025 per cent
• Cards 251 to 310: twenty-four tens, 0.067 per cent
• Cards 311 to 407: twenty-nine tens, 0.056 per cent

A high number is about three and a half times more likely to be a ten than a card from the first series.

That makes sense once you stop thinking about destruction and start thinking about handling. First-series cards were bought in the spring of 1952 by children who spent the summer with them. High numbers turned up late, sold poorly, and a larger share of them went straight into a dealer's stock or a collector's binder instead of a back pocket.

Which is the opposite of what the barge story implies. The cards supposedly carted off by the truckload are the ones that came through in the best shape.

Where that leaves it

I am not going to tell you the dumping definitely never happened. Berger said he was there, he was not a fabulist by trade, and small-scale disposal of damaged or returned stock would be unremarkable and would leave no trace either way.

What I do not accept is the load the story is asked to carry. It is used to explain the scarcity of the 1952 high numbers, and the scarcity has a plainer explanation sitting in the population report: the set got harder to buy as the season went on, every series at a time, and the last ninety-seven cards were the hardest of all to find in a shop in the first place.

The cards did not need to go into the ocean to be scarce. They only needed to arrive in October.

One more label worth correcting

While we are here: 1952 Topps card 311 is routinely called Mantle's rookie card, including in places that ought to know better. It is not. His first card came out the year before, in the 1951 Bowman set, and 311 is his second.

It is the most valuable card of the post-war era and it is not a rookie card, which is its own small lesson about how much weight that phrase can bear. We have gone into that at length in nobody can agree what a rookie card is.

The Mantle has 1,705 copies in the population report and three of them are tens. What happened to those three is a separate story, told in the three PSA 10 Mickey Mantles have not sold since 2001.

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