Auctions
WOOF! Mickey Mantle paces 1954 Red Heart Dog Food set
Any dog lovers who bought Red Heart food for their canines way back in 1954 had a shot at an item that’s become a hot ticket in the hobby: a colorful card of an up-and-coming Mickey Mantle.
And it’s only getting hotter, drawing hefty five-figure prices—as we saw with the recent sale of a ’54 Red Heart Mantle for $41,512.
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Featuring still-sharp corners, perfect centering and a clean image, the card was slabbed with a PSA 9 grade. It touched off an online bidding war, drawing 90 bids during a 10-day listing in June.
Red Heart’s colorful 1954 dog food cards, produced by the Morrell Co., measure slightly larger (2⅝-by-3¾ inches) than standard Topps cards. Only 33 players appeared in the set, each featured in a colorized photo against a bright red, green or (in Mantle’s case) blue background. Besides The Magnificent Yankee, the set featured multiple future Hall of Famers, including Duke Snider, Warren Spahn, Ralph Kiner, Minnie Minoso and Richie Ashburn, plus one of Mantle’s heroes, Stan Musial.
Keep in mind that Topps, because of contractual issues, didn’t include Mantle or Musial in its 1954 set. So Red Heart filled two important voids that year—a fact that hasn’t been lost on collectors in recent years. In 2021, Goldin and Memory Lane, Inc. sold PSA 9 specimens of the Mantle card for $24,600 and $18,192, respectively. Four years ago, two more PSA 9s brought $26,960 (Memory Lane) and $25,200 (Heritage Auctions).
Since then, Gem-Mint examples have soared in value. As always, scarcity comes into play: PSA has graded only 40 examples in a 9 grade.
Multiple Red Heart Mantle cards were available in lesser condition in eBay Buy It Now offerings. A PSA 8 was listed at $15,100, for example, and a trio of PSA 7s had asking prices of $14,999, $10,500 and $8,995.
There was even a PSA 6 with a big, blue, bold Mantle autograph with a $18,495 price tag. That card’s condition flaw: The Mantle image is off-center by around an 80/20 margin.
