In 1952, You Could Buy a Pack of Baseball Cards That Included This Mickey Mantle at a Corner Store. Today, You Would Probably Have to Go to an Auction House

He stands before a cloudless sky that’s more teal than blue, staring off behind you into the distance. He’s a hale American teenager outdoors in a Yankees hat, but that background color, like the banana yellow of the bat on his shoulder, feels otherworldly. Appropriately, a star-lined marquee surrounds his name near the bottom of the image.

Mickey Mantle’s matinee-idol face glows in the Arizona sun. The black-and-white photo was taken during spring training in Mantle’s rookie season, 1951. Topps Chewing Gum Company colorized and printed it the following year, as the company sought to corner a new market.

Early baseball cards were created in the late 19th century by tobacco companies, which inserted cardboard representations of baseball players in their cigarette and loose tobacco packs to help the boxes keep their shape. By the 1930s, companies were producing packs of stand-alone cards that cost 1 cent and included sticks of gum to sweeten the cards’ appeal for children. As baseball’s popularity grew in the postwar era, Topps saw a growth opportunity.

The company began selling its own line of cards and made small innovations that turned these paper advertisements into something a youngster might want to collect and treasure. The company’s cards debuted in 1952 with brighter colors and a larger surface area than previous cards, plus team logos and players’ statistics on the back. The Topps features remain an industry standard to this day.

This 1952 Mantle card hit stores before Mantle was a household name. And though Topps’ first run of cards sold out that year, the majority of Major League Baseball players were released in other groups throughout the season. Sales dwindled, and the final group, which included this image, wasn’t a roaring success.

Boxes upon boxes of unsold product were returned to a Brooklyn warehouse, where whole sets of cards (Mantle was No. 311 of 407) sat untouched for nearly a decade. In 1960, the company decided it needed the storage space, so a Topps employee reportedly took hundreds of boxes out on a barge and dumped them in the Atlantic Ocean. Supposedly, the card’s resulting scarcity is what made No. 311 so coveted in the years after Mantle became a national hero, later that decade.