Micke Mantle, the legendary New York Yankees baseball player, already has another record for history.
A sticker with his effigy was awarded this Sunday after several weeks of auction for 12.6 million dollars (a similar figure in euros).
Two weeks ago it had already become the most expensive sticker ever auctioned, but the price has been rising and it has also been proclaimed as the most expensive sports memorabilia in history.
The rival was not easy to beat: Diego Armando Maradona's shirt from his match against England in the 1986 World Cup, when he scored two goals, one of them remembered as
the hand of God,
sold for 8.5 million euros a few months ago.
"An eight-figure result at an auction in the sports market was the stuff of fantasy just a decade ago," Chris Ivy, director of sports auctions at Heritage, the firm that organized the sale, said in a statement.
“We always knew this letter would shatter records and expectations.
But that doesn't make it any less exciting for a single item to break the eight-figure threshold for the first time."
The seller is businessman Anthony Giordano, 75, who bought the 1952 Topps sticker for his son in 1991 for $50,000 at a collector's fair in New York.
Gordano bought it from collector Alan Rosen.
This one he had bought at a bargain price a few years earlier included in a collection of 5,500 trading cards from 1952, many of them highly valued, that a Massachusetts man had kept in a cardboard box in his attic for more than three decades.
There were several Mantle cards in the box, but none in such good condition.
Giordano asked Rosen to sign a letter certifying the good condition of the copy.
Rosen wrote: "It is in my opinion the best known example in the world."
That letter, included in the auction, and the story give a special value to the card.
Since Giordano bought the little cardboard gem, he hadn't had its quality certified.
It was done by PSA, the largest sticker authentication and rating agency, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 5 is already excellent and 10, perfection, with sharp corners, sharp image, bright and perfectly centered, according to explains the firm on its website.
The auctioned chrome has a 9.5.
Only three Mantle trading cards from 1952, his second season with the Yankees, are known to exist with a 10 and another half-dozen with a 9 or more.
Among the stickers, it has surpassed the record of another Honus Wagner from 1909, whose grade was 2, which in the PSA scale implies good condition, despite the low score.
That stamp of the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball player was recently auctioned for $7.25 million.
Mantle is one of the legends of the Yankees, in which he played his entire career, at the height of Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio, whom he replaced on the team as center fielder.
He was a switch hitter of incredible power, which it is said he began to acquire working with his father, a miner.
He played in the All-Star game 20 times, was a seven-time World Series champion with the Yankees in the 1950s and 1960s, and was elected the best player in the major leagues for three seasons.
In the 1956 season, already a great star, he achieved the triple crown: best batting average, most home runs and most RBIs, something that since that year, only three more players have achieved.
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