The 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers Schedule Cards

By Neil Herzog · July 7, 2026 · 4 min read

Part of the complete 1952 Baseball Cards guide →

I’ll be straight with you: forty years of collecting, four deep-dive articles into the 1952 sets — and I had never even heard of these until now. That’s what I love about this hobby. It can still surprise you.

And this is exactly the kind of thing I live to collect: the oddball stuff nobody else has. I’d so much rather own one of these than a ‘52 Mays that everybody has. It’s so much cooler.

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What are they?

In 1952, the Dodgers had a company called Lumitone Photoprint in New York produce four postcard-sized cards — 3½” by 5½” — as fan giveaways. A way to get game dates and ticket prices into the hands of the Ebbets Field faithful.

The front of each card: a photo of one of four Dodgers, with a facsimile signature and a personal message. The back: the 1952 Brooklyn home schedule, plus either a postcard-style mailing side or Ebbets Field ticket prices — so each card exists with two different backs.

And the four Dodgers? Only these guys: Jackie Robinson. Duke Snider. Gil Hodges. Pee Wee Reese.

If you’ve read my other 1952 guides, you know those names — they’re the Brooklyn core that anchors the Topps set, the Coke Playing Tips, and the Berk Ross issue. Here they are again, on a free handout from the ticket window. The thing they gave away for nothing has become one of the most desirable oddball issues in the hobby — PSA’s own write-up calls these cards “among the most desirable collectibles in the hobby.”

The heartbreak written on the card

Here’s the detail that gets me. The Duke Snider card carries this printed inscription:

“Yours for a world championship in 1952, Duke Snider.”

The ‘52 Dodgers went 96-57, won the pennant… and lost the World Series to the Yankees. Again. That inscription is a little piece of Brooklyn heartbreak frozen in cardboard — a promise the Bums couldn’t keep until 1955. You can’t manufacture that kind of story. It only exists on a card printed before the ending was known.

The census: 53 cards. Total.

I pulled the PSA population report, and these numbers make everything else I’ve covered look common. This is the entire graded universe of the set:

Fifty-three straight-graded cards. In the entire set. Two PSA 9s exist — one Snider, one Hodges — and there has never been a PSA 10 of anything.

Sit with the Robinson number for a second. This is a Jackie Robinson card with twenty graded copies on Earth. Not twenty in high grade — twenty, period. His 1952 Topps has over 1,200 graded. His ‘52 Coke Playing Tips card, which I covered as an extreme rarity, has 33. This one has twenty, and the four PSA 8s are the finest known.

And the Pee Wee Reese might quietly be the toughest card of all: eleven copies, and a single PSA 8 sits alone at the top of the census. One.

What are they worth?

Honestly? There’s no price chart for something this scarce — sales are so infrequent that every auction basically sets its own market. What I can tell you: PSA calls them among the most desirable collectibles in the hobby, the populations are microscopic, and every card features a Hall of Fame Brooklyn legend. When one surfaces, it’s a “pay what it takes” situation for the handful of collectors who know what they’re looking at.

Which, now, includes you.

My take: this is the whole point of collecting

Everybody has the mainstream stuff. Everybody knows the ‘52 Topps Mantle, and half the hobby owns a ‘52 Mays in some grade. But a Jackie Robinson card that even lifelong collectors have never heard of, given away free at Ebbets Field, with twenty known copies? That’s the stuff that makes this hobby magic.

Four articles into the 1952 sets, and the pattern is unmistakable: the further you get from the mainstream, the cooler — and scarcer — it gets. If one of these ever crosses your path in a collection or a dusty showcase, you now know something almost nobody else at the table knows. Act accordingly.

🔗 See if any 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers schedule cards are listed right now »

Found something like this? With populations this tiny, grading for authentication is non-negotiable. (See “Is It Worth Grading Your Card in 2026?” and “How Card Grading Works in 2026”.)

Explore every 1952 set in the complete 1952 guide →