1952 TOPPS MICKEY MANTLE #311 PSA 7 NRMT

If you visited the Y.M.C.A. in 1950 in Joplin, Kansas, for a game of pickup basketball, you would have had a good chance of playing against a 19-year-old kid named Mickey Mantle. When Mantle was not shooting hoops in the gym, he worked in motor maintenance in Cardin, Oklahoma, about 50 miles north of his birthplace. Mantle moved to Commerce, Oklahoma, when he was three years old. His 672-square-foot childhood home still stands at 319 South Quincy Street, where passersby can imagine his father Mutt teaching him how to hit from both sides of the plate in his backyard beside a handmade shed that housed his father's tools. That shed served as Mantle's first stadium wall—a backdrop to block his hits as his grandfather pitched to him lefty and his father threw righty. The rules were simple, invented not by Alexander Cartwright but by Mickey and his father. A ball hit below the windows was a single, above the windows a double, the roof a triple, and over the house a home run. ""I was the only kid in town that didn't get in trouble for breaking a window,"" Mantle said. The shed still stands with dents from Mantle's hits—a national sports monument for the ages.