One of the coolest items to sell at auction this year was a 1951 Bowman Baseball High Series uncut sheet with Mickey Mantle’s rookie card. Collect Auctions sold it in November 2025 for $252,000.
Heres the auction description:
Hard to imagine a 1951 Bowman artifact with a more spectacular pedigree: an uncut sheet from the difficult High-Number series and a Mickey Mantle Rookie card. Now that’s a hobby trifecta you can bet on. Uncut sheets are rare enough, especially from the classic early Bowman Baseball issues, and this one constitutes ½ of the 72-card High-Number Series via cards numbered 253-288. The 18 ½ -by-12 ½-inch sheet is nothing short of sensational, with a lineup of three Hall of Famers (counting The Mick) and a host of important stars of the era. There is some modest scuffing and scratching to a handful of cards, and only the tiniest of wrinkles of about ¾-inch on the Mantle Rookie, a hiccup discovered by careful touch rather than visual examination. The bottom row of the sheet, Nos. 262-270, is cut a bit close, but not enough to dictate a miscut designation. As noted above, there is light scuffing to No. 272 Meyer and 273 Murtaugh, minor scratching to Nos. 277-279 and 287, plus a small section of paper loss to No. 286 Usher. Joining Mickey Mantle’s fabled Rookie card atop the marquee are Hall of Famers Bucky Harris and Frankie Frisch, along with the likes of Danny Murtaugh, George Metkovich, Gene Bearden, Jackie Jensen, Birdie Tebbetts, Luke Easter, Chuck Dressen, Carl Erskine, Wally Moses, Gus Zernial, Howe Pollet and Don Mueller. Good company for the most treasured and important Rookie card of the postwar era.
While many reports called this the only known uncut sheet with Mantle’s rookie, a sheet with the same layout sold at Sotheby’s (The Copeland Collection) in March 1991 for $38,500.
They look pretty similar to me, with some unfortunate scuffing appearing in Collect Auction’s scans. The bottom border, near the Bilko card, looks tighter on the Copeland sheet, but that could be an effect of a camera angle, perhaps. What do you think?
Happy collecting!
Check out The Uncut Sheet Archive for more!
P.S. Mantle’s position on the sheet may explain why roughly 15% of PSA submissions carry a qualifier.
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