Most vintage collectors know that Mickey Mantle doesn't have a 1954 Topps card. Topps and Bowman were fighting over exclusive player contracts and Mantle landed in Bowman’s sets in 1954 and 1955, leaving a two-year gap in his Topps run.
Fewer collectors know that a 1954 Topps-style Mantle actually does exist, you just couldn’t find it in a pack. It appeared in the August 23, 1954 issue of Sports Illustrated, only the second issue the magazine ever published.
In the early 1950s, Bowman was the established leader in baseball cards, having entered the market in 1948. Topps was the aggressive newcomer, and its 407-card 1952 set was its first major challenge to Bowman. Both companies knew that stars sold packs so the fight over exclusive contracts escalated into lawsuits, with many players appearing in one company’s set but not the other’s.
Mantle was one of the biggest prizes: he appeared in the 1952 and 1953 Topps sets, then vanished from Topps for two years because of his Bowman contract. Ted Williams went the other way: Topps made him both the first and last cards of its 1954 set, and Bowman was forced to pull its own Williams card (#66) and replace it with Jimmy Piersall. That withdrawn Bowman Williams remains one of the great rarities of 1950s cards.
Sports Illustrated debuted on August 16, 1954, with Eddie Mathews on the cover. Inside was a foldout of 27 reproductions of 1954 Topps cards, featuring Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Duke Snider and Mathews himself. A week later the second issue ran another 27-card foldout, this time all New York Yankees. Fifteen were color reproductions of 1954 Topps cards, including Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and Phil Rizzuto. The other twelve were black-and-white cards of Yankees who weren’t in the Topps set: Gil McDougald, Allie Reynolds, Enos Slaughter and others.
Mantle was one of the twelve.
The foldout ran as part of a Sports Illustrated promotion with Topps. Strictly speaking, it’s not a 1954 Topps card: it was printed on magazine paper rather than card stock, with a black-and-white player image set in a 1954 Topps-style design, and it was never distributed in packs. But unlike fantasy cards made decades later, it genuinely dates to 1954, printed in the middle of the very season Mantle was off-limits to Topps.
The card companies' rivalry ended in 1956, when Topps bought Bowman’s baseball card business. Mantle returned to Topps that year on his famous #135, and the Bowman name disappeared from baseball cards for decades.
These first two issues of Sports Illustrated are surprisingly affordable. Copies with the foldouts intact often just sell for a few hundred dollars. The first issue carries the history, and the second carries the Mantle.
For me, these magazines sit at a great intersection: the birth of Sports Illustrated, the golden age of cardboard, and one of the hobby’s most consequential business rivalries. Bowman had Mantle’s 1954 baseball card, but Sports Illustrated had his picture. For one week in August, that was enough to give collectors the Topps Mantle they never had...
