By 2013, Topps may have been suffering from a bit of a Mickey Mantle hangover. Or perhaps more accurately, the Mantle family was suffering from a Topps hangover. In 2013, for the first time since 2005, Topps did not create any Mickey Mantle cards of any kind - neither new ones, or reprints.
In 2017, the Mantle family announced a new deal with Panini USA to create brand new Mickey Mantle trading cards and memorabilia products. Hobby press coverage of the announcement included thoughts from the family that perhaps there had been too much Mantle material produced by Topps during the 7 years Topps was actively issuing Mantle cards of every variety imaginable, from 2006 through 2012.
But the interaction of the Topps Baseball set and Mickey Mantle probably began in 1996, when some sort of initial agreement with the Mantle family must have been in place, leading mostly to a somewhat tame (compared to what was to come 10 years later) amount of new reprint issues from Topps and one insert series in Stadium Club. 1996 did, however, see a brand new Mantle card issued as part of 1996 Topps Baseball at card #7, quite probably the first set of baseball cards created by Topps after Mickey's death in August, 1995. It seems a seed of the Uniform # = Card # strategy of the 2013 set had been planted.
In 1997, no new Mantle cards were created; Topps contented itself with only a small series of Mantle card reprints. However the 1997 Topps Baseball set did contain a small tribute to The Mick - no card #7 was issued at all.
A new tradition had begun in the Topps Baseball set, which continued through the 2005 set.
Probably in 2006, Topps procured a new agreement with the Mantle family, and new Mickey Mantle baseball card products hit the shelves in some quantity. This included a card of Mantle at #7 in the checklist once again and became an annual tradition, with a new Mantle card #7 each year until 2012, at which point the agreement must have expired.
Without a properly licensed ability to produce a new Mantle card in 2013, Topps chose to revert to their '96 - '05 Mantle tradition of continuing to silently, and legally, honor Mantle by simply not issuing a card #7 at all.
Which then continued through the 2016 set. Prior to the announcement of Panini's new agreement with the family, 2017 Topps Baseball had already been released - and it included a non-Mantle card #7 for the first time since 1995. Appropriately enough, it was for new Yankees Catcher Gary Sanchez' sophomore campaign, with a nice shiny Topps All-Rookie Cup on his card. In 2018, card #7 features the official RC logo Rookie Card for Yankees Outfield prospect Clint Frazier. Probably, a new, again silent tradition of honoring Mantle at checklist slot #7 will continue.
I would imagine some collectors are not particularly fond of the way missing a checklist # then cascades the interaction of the card #s and the binder pages when displaying a set that way. I don't get too particularly concerned about it.
I enjoyed some of the Mantle base cards and inserts I was able to pull towards the end of the Topps-Mantle family agreement. I did not care for some of the exploitation of the collector impulse displayed by Topps in some of the Mantle releases, such as the series of cards celebrating each Home Run Mantle ever hit, all identical in appearance save for the # of the Home Run.
But I never did get around to picking up a version of the card pictured on the top of this post, Mantle's 1951 Bowman issue sometimes considered to be his "Rookie Card." RCs don't impress me all that much, but I do like that '51 Bowman and look forward to someday owning a simple reprint copy.
What I would really rather have of it is a nice 5x7, or a touch larger, reprint version that could actually be displayed on a wall. I have never known of such a thing to exist, but neither would I be surprised if one does. If you know of such a baseball trading card memorabilia product being created somewhere over the years, I would like to hear about it.
In the mean time, let's get back to the 2013 Topps Baseball "Sea Turtles"
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