April 3, 2025: Spring Auction
This is only a preview. The auction will open on: 3/17/2025 1:00:00 AM
What happens when you link the most popular major league player of the postwar era with the rarest Topps Test issue of all time? You end up with a remarkable, one-of-a-kind artifact like this 1961 Topps Dice Game Test Issue Uncut Sheet featuring 18 All-Stars from the period, with the prize being Mickey Mantle. In a hobby that delights in chanting about rarity, this one takes the cake in the form of one of the most intriguing Topps Test issues that has bewildered and enchanted advanced collectors for more than six decades. With perhaps fewer than three dozen examples of the individual 2 ½-by-3 ½-inch cards having been slabbed by PSA or SGC, the only known uncut sheet of this almost mythic set takes on similarly spectacular importance. The sheet is 18-by-14 inches and in a condition rarely encountered in uncut material after more than a half-century. The front of the sheet boasts minimal wear to the corners and is jostled only by some staining that is most readily apparent on the broad white border and less so on our All-Stars, with diminishing effect from top to bottom and hardly a whisper reaching the Holy Grail, Mickey Mantle in the middle row to the far right. The back of the sheet, with the arcane game charts and play results, is virtually without issue, remarkably clean and vivid. With only three individual Mantles having been slabbed by PSA, the sale of two of the PSA 1’s at nearly $400,000 in recent Heritage sales provides a nice glimpse into the kind of heady territory we are looking at here. The Uncut Sheet offered here opens at $10,000; it says something about the clout of Mickey Mantle that the remaining 17 All-Stars don’t get a mention until this point in the proceedings. Willie Mays, matching Mantle with the title of most graded by PSA, at a whopping three cards, topped $85,000 in a Memory Lane auction several years ago, and the handful of others that have sold over that time have generally been $10,000 and more in PSA 1 holders. The rest of our lineup, including 16 of 18 with a pedigree from the 1962 All-Star Game: (in order on the sheet, left to right five cards in each row) – Top Row: Drysdale, Musial, Mays, Frank Robinson, Crandall and Groat; Middle Row: Davenport, Mazeroski, White, Pascual, Kaline and Mantle; and Bottom Row: Wagner, Battey, Kubek, Brooks Robinson, Richardson and Siebern. If the mention about the 1962 All-Star Game(s) confuses, we are here to help. The Dice Game that Topps conjured up here but almost certainly never produced to any scale or distribution, was obviously inspired by the growing interest in tabletop baseball board games. While the set has semi-official nomenclature in the hobby dating it to 1961, it’s clear that the more accurate date would be 1963 or thereabouts. The single-most compelling evidence is the crudely airbrushed St. Louis insignia on Dick Groat’s cap while he clearly is still wearing the garb of his beloved Pirates; the 1960 MVP was traded to the Cardinals in the winter of 1962. All of the 18 players in the set were All-Stars at some point between 1959-62 when MLB tested the adage about “too much of a good thing” and held two contests each summer during that span. While ostensibly created to raise monies for the players’ laughably modest pension fund at the time, the notion was mercifully put to rest after 1962, restoring the game to its previous stature; it might take a while, but the players’ pension fund would ultimately develop other revenue streams to notable success. The legendary Dice Game Test Issue boasts additional charming foibles, like some of the obviously handwritten letters indicating dice outcomes, or the cosmically clumsy and grammatically awful National and American “Lg.” designations on each card rather than the more customary team name. On some of the individual cards that have surfaced there can be actual added ink notations, cross-outs and the like to the whimsical and intriguing charts on the back, but on the uncut sheet the handwritten component is actually printed in that fashion. Again, with some of the individual cards that are known, there can be staple remnants, suggesting the cards might have been part of the company’s hilariously quaint record-keeping efforts in binders. As hobby veterans will recall, that goofy attempt to preserve the history of the various sets included the jarring idea of pasting individual cards of various years into albums, two of each card, unceremoniously molested for posterity by being glued to the front in one instance and the back in the other. These wonders from the fabled 1989 Guernsey’s Topps Archives Auction included pages of front-and-back pasted cards that were one of many archival treasures from that auction that included original artwork, transparencies, rare uncut sheets, production materials and a lot more.
Rarest Mickey Mantle Card on One-of-A-Kind 1961 (1963) Topps Dice Game Test Issue Uncut Sheet
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