What’s the Mona Lisa of the sports card worth? We won’t know for sure until the bidding on Mathis’ own card concludes on April 20th, but Heritage Auctions estimates the card to be worth about $3.5 million, as one of only six copies of the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle to receive a Mint 9 rating from the memorabilia specialists at PSA (three even more valuable copies of the card are rated Mint 10). Should it fetch anything close to that price, it will become the most expensive sports card ever sold at auction, surpassing the 1909 Honus Wagner that went for $3.12 million a couple of years ago. That would be a fitting passing of the, ah, mantle for those particular baseball cards, as Heritage’s director of sports auctions Chris Ivy explains: The Mantle is the jewel of Mathis’ collection, in part because he’d previously traded “the vast majority” of his preexisting collection in order to acquire it. But, despite his parting of the ways with a childhood hobby in order to fund a very grown-up house, he hasn’t completely given up hope of one day getting one of those even rarer Mint 10 Topps 1952 Mickey Mantles:
