1956 Topps Mickey Mantle #135 PSA 8 NM-MT

On September 20, 1951, Chicago White Sox All-Star Eddie Robinson hit a deep fly to right field at Yankee Stadium. A 19-year-old Mickey Mantle charged to the wall, making a valiant leap, but Robinson’s fly landed in the seats for a home run. Getty Images captured Mantle’s effort to make the catch in the seventh inning of a 5-4 Yankees victory, and that photograph later served as inspiration for the background painting on Mantle’s 1956 Topps Baseball card. Mantle also drew a pair of walks and scored twice in that game, a pivotal win that kept the Yankees atop the American League standings as the season wound down. Mantle played in six of the final ten games of the ‘51 season, delivering a .423 on-base percentage and scoring four times to help propel the Yankees to the pennant before a knee injury derailed him during Game 2 of the World Series. That injury, however, never prevented Mantle from playing with reckless abandon in the years to come. Photographers continued framing him in snapshots scaling outfield walls or running and diving across the grass, and another of his notable catches came in the ‘56 World Series when he made a long sprint into left-center to make a catch and keep Don Larsen’s perfect game intact. In addition to his fourth World Series ring, Mantle won MVP and Triple Crown honors in 1956 after leading the majors with a .353 average, 52 home runs, and 130 RBI—one of the brightest among Mantle’s many illustrious campaigns. Of the more than 10,350 times PSA has assessed the gray-backed version of the 1956 Topps Mickey Mantle, just 87 copies have a better grade than this stellar NM-MT PSA 8. The certification number on this card has been checked against the third-party grader's online database and is active as of 02/20/2026.