Mr. Mint: The early sports card dealer who hunted down vintage cards now worth billions – The New York Times

Sports Memorabilia and Collectibles
A 1990 Pacific trading card of Alan "Mr. Mint" Rosen, the "Indiana Jones" of early sports card dealers. Photo courtesy of eBay
Alan Rosen was the Indiana Jones of vintage sports cards.
The Paterson, N.J., native earned the nickname “Mr. Mint” for his ability to find old cards boxed and stored in perfect condition. From 1978 until his death in 2017, his obsession with finding mint condition vintage cards turned him into the hobby’s first card millionaire and resulted in dozens of finds that still reverberate through the business. Many, if not most, of the highest-graded vintage-era sports cards in existence can be traced to Rosen, including at least one of the Gem-Mint PSA 10 graded 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle cards that some believe could be worth as much as $50 million today.
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In a 1988 article, Sports Illustrated’s Dan Geringer wrote, “Alan Rosen is the King of Cards, the Duke of Dough. In the high-stakes baseball card game, the nation’s premier card maven.” That’s quite a journey from being a copy machine salesman and repairman, a career he gave up about the time he bought his first major collection, according to his friend and sometimes business partner, Joe Esposito, of B & E Collectibles in Thornwood, N.Y.
Rosen’s purchases included nine of the 50 or so T-206 Honus Wagners known to exist, 65 high-condition 1952 Topps Mantles, 100 mint condition 1955 Bowman baseball complete sets (created out of unopened packs), 32 “uncirculated” rookie 1951 Bowman Mantles, seven unopened 1948-49 Leaf boxes with rookie Jackie Robinsons, Satchel Paiges, Ted Williams, and Joe DiMaggios and 70 near-mint or better T-206 Ty Cobbs. That’s only the crown jewels among a multitude of other treasures. Rosen purchased not just entire collections but entire inventories of card shops, paying top dollar in cash. He would then advertise the cards and his appearances at shows and even sell in phone auctions, breaking up these volume buys into many smaller sales that reportedly grossed over $6 million in 1990 alone. For context, that year, all of Topps generated a reported $170 million in sales.
These finds would not remain in Rosen’s possession for long.
“I had a one-day auction,” Rosen told the Associated Press in 1990. “One banker spent $100,000 and another $50,000. I did almost three-quarters of a million dollars in business — in one day. I spent $90,000 in Pittsburgh, came back (to New Jersey) and sold everything I bought. Not that I’m an idiot, but even an idiot can make money selling quality cards.”
Beginning in the 1970s, he professed that there would always be a market for older cards and memorabilia, and history has proven him right.
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Rosen focused on the cards he most wanted as a child and reached a point where he didn’t have to find the cards — they found him. Cash, it turns out, is always king. Rosen was believed to have foot-long stacks of $100 bills in his ubiquitous briefcase.
His biggest find, and the one for which he’s most famous, was known as the “Boston 1952 Topps Find,” with over 6,000 Gem-Mint high numbers, including 65 Mantles, decades after all unsold stock was thought to be sunk in the Atlantic Ocean because Topps needed storage space at their facility. Cards were released in series then so the box only contained the high-number cards. And there was an absurdly high volume of key stars in that second series, including not only Mantle (card #311) but also Robinson (#312) and Mays (#261). Sotheby’s Auction House called it, “The greatest find of baseball cards ever.”
Its value today? Based on the 100-fold (at least) increase in value of a high-condition 1952 Mantle versus when Rosen appraised the value then of that find, the number could exceed a billion dollars. Other high-number cards in the set in Mint condition have increased only about 20 fold, according to data from Card Ladder, which tracks card sales and current market values. That would value the find today at merely $300 million. But the 65 first-ever Topps Mantles, the most coveted card in hobby history, tip the scales more toward the higher number.
According to PSA, the deal first came together when the phone rang while Rosen watched ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” on a Saturday afternoon in 1986. A Boston-area forklift operator knew a fellow truck driver, Ted Lodge, who had “several top condition 1952 Topps baseball cards.” That person kept increasing the number of cards he had in subsequent calls. A skeptical Rosen made the trip there when the number of Mantles reached 30.
Rosen put together over $125,000 in cash with the help of another New Jersey dealer and took along an armed policeman for the ride to Boston.
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“I picked up a stack of about 30 cards, and they were all Mantles, with some others still face down. About 42 beautiful Mantles.” Lodge then said to the dumbstruck Rosen, “Would you like to see the rest of the cards?”
The cards were so pristine with such razor-sharp corners that Rosen said he believed they had to be reproductions, until he saw the opened 1952 case from Topps. According to the case label, the cards were leftovers from long-ago giveaways by a sporting goods company, where the owner said they were handed out as thank yous to customers buying bats and gloves.
One can only imagine those transactions: “Would you like a 1952 Gem-Mint Topps Mickey Mantle with that Louisville Slugger, kid?”
“Why, thank you, yes, I would.”
Rosen returned home and sorted the cards into high-numbered runs that included Mays, Mantle and Robinson, along with the rookie Eddie Mathews. He started selling the runs for $12,000, moving nine on the first day. Then he raised his price to $18,000 and finally $20,000. He sold 10 off-center Mantles for a total of $10,000 to one buyer. The best Mantles — including the one that later graded a PSA 10 — were sold for $3,500. Rosen said he grossed $475,000 in the couple of months before they were all gone.
According to Rosen in 2000 via his website, his second-best find ever was from Paris, Tenn. He landed over 750 unopened wax boxes of 1954 and 1955 Topps and Bowman cards in football and baseball. From these boxes, he assembled over 100 “mint condition” 1955 Bowman baseball sets. There was a Bowman Mantle in 1954, too. There were many Topps Robinsons (1954 and 1955), the rookie Hank Aaron (1954 Topps), the rookie Ernie Banks (1954 Topps), the rookie Sandy Koufax and the rookie Roberto Clemente (both 1955 Topps), as well as dozens of NFL Hall of Famers. Rosen estimated the value of this find at $7 million in 2000. Today, it would be 10 to 15 times that, according to Card Ladder, or upwards of $100 million.
No. 3 was a Kansas City find of over 11,000 uncirculated Bowman baseball cards from 1951 to 1953, including 32 rookie 1951 Mantles and 40 1952 Mantles. Valued by Rosen in 2000 at $4.5 million, its value today would approach $100 million, mainly due to the Mantles and also the 1951 rookie Mays.
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Rosen said he made his first major purchase in 1984 in Tampa, Fla. It was of “hundreds of thousands” of cards issued between 1959 and 1963 by Topps, Fleer and Post Cereal. He paid $150,000 then and valued it at $1.5 million in 2000. Today it’s worth at least 10 to 20 times that.
Among his more interesting finds were 270 “Gem-Mint” 1954 cards manufactured by Wilson Franks, which are extremely rare and considered by collectors as one of the most beautiful designs ever produced (despite the fact that they feature a floating package of hot dogs on the front of each card). The entire set was only 20 cards and included Ted Williams, so there were probably 10 to 15 of just him among the 270. The value of just one Mint PSA 9 Williams Wilson Franks today is unknown since only one is graded. But a PSA 5 sold for nearly $200,000. Only 307 Williams Wilson Franks cards have been graded by all the companies, according to Card Ladder.
Rosen had a special fondness for his “Yankee Lady Find,” in which he purchased the collection of every Yankees card ever produced from a woman in Queens, N.Y. Of course, he sold them almost immediately. On his website in the early aughts, he lamented, “I wish I had that one back.”
How did he do it?
“He was extremely aggressive,” said Esposito, who accompanied Rosen on many deals. In a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rosen said, “I collect money. Hundred dollar bills. I’m loud. I’m a braggart. And I’m brash. But I’m the best.”
“Al was all-in,” Esposito said. “No deal was too big. The rest of us were leery. We were worried about cash flow. If he didn’t have the cash, he’d borrow to put a deal together. He was arrogant but knew how to turn on the charm, especially when he was in someone’s house. Once he entered the house, there was a 90 percent chance he was leaving with the cards.”
After the Sports Illustrated article, “(Rosen) had the field of buying collections all to himself,” Esposito said. “Anyone looking to sell something big found him. But his last five years in business were tough because the competition got fierce. The auction houses came into the hobby.” Rosen could not compete. A dealer to the end, at the time of his death, Esposito said Rosen had no remnants of his major card finds as keepsakes.
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“Al should be remembered as a pioneer in recognizing the value of cards and paying for them,” Esposito said. “It was perceived that he would pay the most, even though that wasn’t always the case. And people trusted the way he graded cards. When he said a card was Mint, people believed him.”
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Michael Salfino writes about fantasy sports and collectibles for The Athletic. His numbers-driven fantasy analysis began with a nationally syndicated newspaper column in 2004. He has covered a variety of sports for FiveThirtyEight and The Wall Street Journal, for whom he also wrote about movies. He’s been the U.S. elections correspondent for the U.K.’s The Independent. Michael helped Cade Massey of the Wharton School of Business originate an NFL prediction model https://massey-peabody.com that understands context and chance and avoids the trap of overconfidence. He strives to do the same when projecting player performance. Follow Michael on Twitter @MichaelSalfino

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