LEADING MICKEY MANTLE COLLECTOR STEVEN LANE TRACES THE MICK’S LEGENDARY BASEBALL CAREER THROUGH A ONE-OF-A-KIND COLLECTION OF KEEPSAKES
By Jesse Hughey | August 5, 2025
Steven Lane, owner of one of the most significant collections of Mickey Mantle memorabilia on the planet, chuckles as he recalls dumping millions of dollars’ worth of baseball cards out the window of his sixth-floor Brooklyn apartment as his classmates on the sidewalk below scrambled to snatch up Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax, Roberto Clemente, and other favorite players. It was a weekly ritual.
Of course, the cards weren’t worth quite that much in the mid-1960s. Topps baseball cards were a nickel a pack or $1.25 a box, Lane recalls, and every Sunday his grandfather came over to have dinner with him and his family and presented him with a box. Afterward, Lane would settle into his routine.
“I opened the box and created three piles,” Lane says. “One Yankees, one everybody else … and the third stack was the gum. I would be chewing on the gum, putting all the Yankees in one pile. I would put them all in a little baseball card book. Then Monday, the next day, I would tell the kids in school, ‘Be outside my window – I’m dumping all my non-Yankees out the window.’”
Steven Lane (left) has been a Mickey Mantle fan since his childhood days in Brooklyn. Here he is with his favorite New York Yankee in 1985. Photo courtesy Steven Lane.
He estimates the number of cards he threw to his classmates in the tens of thousands, as he did not collect any player who didn’t wear the pinstripes. Today one of those boxes, unopened, could be worth $300,000 or more. “It was probably several millions of dollars I threw away,” he says without a trace of regret in his voice.
Lane can laugh about it now, though. His singular focus on Yankees, and one player in particular, has resulted in an incredible collection of Mickey Mantle memorabilia. Lane details how he obtained many of his pieces in his 2022 book, Mickey Mantle: A Life in Memorabilia, which traces the arc of Mantle’s career as a Yankee as well as his pre- and post-Major League Baseball life through descriptions of items stretching from his Oklahoma childhood through his 1995 funeral service.
This game-used baseball from July 19, 1949, inscribed and signed by a 17-year-old Mantle during his first season as a professional ballplayer, is a highlight of Lane’s collection, a portion of which is available in Heritage’s August 23-24 Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction.
Among those items are the first baseball Mantle ever signed and his earliest known autograph – his signature on the back of his fourth-grade class photo from 1939. “What’s unique about that picture – other than that it’s a Type 1 photo, meaning it’s one of a kind, with no negative – is he not only signed his name but wrote all the names of the kids in his class,” Lane says. “He put a heart around the name of one of his classmates who he had a crush on, and also his teacher, who he also had a crush on.”
The first of hundreds of thousands of baseballs Mantle signed over the course of his career and post-career days has its own amusing story, too. A month earlier, he had signed with his first professional team, the New York Yankees Class D squad, the Independence Yankees, managed by Harry Craft.
“[Mantle] and his roommate in 1949 were in their hotel room, and the roommate was a pitcher [Bob Mallon] who had just won his first game,” Lane says. “The manager flipped him the ball from the last pitch. Mantle told him to flip him the ball, so he did, and Mantle wrote the date and score and ‘My First Pro. Win.’ The pitcher asked, ‘Why are you signing the ball?’ and Mantle said, ‘Because some day I’m going to be famous.’”
Mantle’s earliest known autograph graces the back of one of his elementary school class photos. That’s him on the front row, second from right.
The future Hall of Famer’s confident prediction, of course, came true. The July 19, 1949, 6-3 victory on seven hits was the first of many professional wins to come for the Mick. Lane is only the second owner of the ball, which Mallon kept until near the end of his life before putting it up for auction in 2019.
“I look at myself as the keeper of this piece of history before it’s time for someone else to take it over,” Lane says of the museum-worthy baseball. In fact, that attitude could be applied to each piece in his collection, a portion of which was on display at this summer’s National Sports Collectors Convention in Rosemont, Illinois, and is now available in Heritage’s August 23-24 Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction.
That 1949 ball and Mantle’s elementary school class photo are two of the 15 items on offer from The Steven Lane Collection, a remarkable trove that also includes highlights such as a game-used Mantle bat from 1953, Mantle’s signed New York Yankees player’s contract from the same year, and an All-Star team wristwatch presented to Mantle by Look magazine.
Another highlight of Lane’s collection is one of Mantle’s game-used bats from 1953, available in Heritage’s August 23-24 Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction.
Slated for a future Heritage auction is another signed Mantle ball from Lane’s collection that could be considered a matching bookend to the Mick’s first autographed baseball. Hailing straight from Mantle’s Dallas home, the ball, signed “My 535th H.R.,” marks a joyous moment from the end of his MLB days.
With the Yankees in Detroit on September 19, 1968, during the final week of Mantle’s career, he was facing pitcher Denny McLain in the eighth inning. He had 534 career home runs, tying him with Jimmie Foxx for third on the all-time home run list behind Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. Knowing this would be the Mick’s final at-bat in the Motor City, McLain conspired with catcher Jim Price to give him number 535.
Mantle overheard, and when Price returned from the conversation, he asked, “Did I hear him right? He is going to let me hit one?”
Wary of a ruse, Mantle took the first pitch for a strike, then fouled one off. Finally convinced the generosity was genuine, he smashed a fastball into the right-field upper decks, and McLain and Mantle alike were grinning and laughing as he rounded third. Mantle would finish his career with 536 homers.
Though Lane is nearing the end of his collecting journey at the age of 70, it turns out the hobby is a hard habit to break. “It is an illness,” he said of his decades-long collecting career when we caught up with him a few days before the National Sports Collectors Convention. “I will be going to the National and bringing a bunch of cash with me, and if I see something I have to have, I will get it to replace something that I took off the wall to sell in the auction in August.”
