Topps could not put gum in its first baseball packs, so it used caramel.
When it launched its first baseball cards in 1951, a rival had bubble gum locked up by contract, so the packs went out with a slab of caramel instead. Gum arrived the next year, and kids kept the cards and threw the gum away. In 2022 one 1952 Mickey Mantle card sold for $12.6 million.
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