1952 Mantle in TV Show
 

I was flipping around the TV the other night and they were about to arrest the bad guy. He said he would give up if, after they arrest him, he can just look at what's in the case one more time. Well, I wanted to know what it was so I stuck around. They arrested him and then they opened the case to reveal a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card. He said, "It's a Mantle rookie card and it's worth millions!" What show was was that on?

It made me think of all those threads on Net54 where we mention a show or movie where they show baseball cards. I found this fairly exhaustive list on the web when trying to find out about the recent show I saw:

http://baseballcardbreakdown.blogspo...es-and-tv.html

In the first season, I believe, of Better Call Saul, there is a character named Pryce who had his card collection stolen and reference is made by him after the theft to a 1952 Topps Mantle being part of the collection. The theft of his collection was included in a couple of episodes. Not sure if the scene you describe is from that series though.

there was an episode of Hart to Hart in about 1981 that featured a stolen collection, including the Mick...but it wasn't referenced as millions...that probably wasn't the episode you referenced

God I'm old....

That's got to be a fairly recent show then. No '52 Mantles have been worth millions till the last few years.

And thanks Chase, now I'm going to have to go back and start watching "Better Call Saul" on Netflix. I don't remember that Pryce guy you were talking about. LOL

Pryce on "Better Call Saul" is Mark Proksch--the same guy who plays Colin Robinson on "What We Do in the Shadows." I love him. :o

Mark Proksch on IMDB

Tough one...
 

Not the one you are looking for, but the plot of the Bruce Willis flick "Cop Out" contains a reference to a '52 Topps card - I think it is the Pafko, though. Willis' character tries to sell the card for less than a grand, if I recall, and at the end of the film, someone shoots the guy carrying the card in his shirt pocket and the bullet also destroys the card. Nobody cared but Willis.

Yup, it was the #1 Pafko card from the '52 Topps set. I think he wanted to sell it to pay for his daughter's wedding, or something like that. It was a bit of a throwback to when price guides would inflate the values of the first and last cards in sets, because back in the day kids supposedly rubber banded their cards together with those first and last cards being on the tops and bottoms of the stacks, and getting the most damage from the rubber bands then. So nicer condition first and last cards in sets were supposedly worth more money then than most other cards in the set. Not sure that thinking is much the case anymore.

52 T Mantle in TV show
 

I think it was a recent episode of newer TV show - Big Sky

bad guy going to jail...opens trunk of car to look at 52T Mantle ..one more time

You found it! Thank you. :D

Yes, Big Sky - I watched that episode. The bad guy stashed the card away in a '79 Firebird before being locked up years prior. After getting out of jail years later, he went looking for his card, tearing up several '79 Firebirds along the way before he finally found the one where he stashed the card. Pretty far fetched plot, but hey, it DID feature a '52 Topps Mantle, so that made it pretty cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOzEWE1IU0Q

The Pryce character in Better Call Saul was pretty funny. They got some things right ("It's a mint, 60/40, 90/10 on the reverse. I could go on...") but sadly couldn't follow it up. When Mike works it out with Nacho to get his cards back, they bring out a bunch of junk wax boxes that supposedly contain this guy's Mantle and Aaron cards. If they were worth the fortune he had told the police, you would expect to see slabs - but he's digging through raw commons and then claims to find all the expensive cards. Not super believable.

It's hard to get hobby details right for stuff like this. Even Stephen King screwed it up in "Needful Things." It was clear he had done some card research, but some of the things he said just came across as a bit off, referring to "Fleers" and "Lucky Strike" cards.

Nothing nearly that exciting happened during my less exhausting search for anything in my collection.


However, somewhere, there's a Red Dodge Intrepid with a bunch of my favorite CDs under the drivers' seat.

.

Well, bear in mind the timeline of BCS starts around 2002.

I'm not guessing he would have a Mantle RC totally raw, not even a penny sleeve, in a 2 row box with hundreds of other cards. Even in 2002.