Collectible investment service to offer shares of Mantle home

Oct. 20—COMMERCE, Okla. — An investment service that specializes in offering shares in high-end collectibles and sports memorabilia is entering new territory, and they're doing it in Commerce, Oklahoma.

Rally, an investment service that was a pioneer in offering fractional equity ownership in collectible assets, said it is offering 47,000 shares of the Mickey Mantle childhood home in Commerce.

The initial public offering is slated for 11 a.m. Friday, Oct. 27, and shares cost $7 each for a total offering of $329,000.

Rob Petrozzo, Rally co-founder and chief product officer, said Commerce residents will have a chance to own a piece of the home for free.

Petrozzo said in a phone interview Friday from his New York office that he's hoping to come to Commerce in the next few days to hold a public town meeting to offer residents of the former mining town in the northeastern corner of Ottawa County a chance to get a stake in what he sees as the town's most famous asset.

"We have around 2,200 individual equity shares at $7 a share that we're going to give away for free so everybody in town can have a piece of the most important home in Commerce," Petrozzo said. "They have a real equity in it and they have a say in what happens to the future of that home."

Petrozzo said Rally will allow its investors to make proposals on the property's future, which will be submitted quarterly and voted on by all shareholders. They will get to vote on whether it becomes a museum, a national landmark, or a baseball diamond added to the backyard for local little leagues. Any profits earned from those proposals would be returned to investors as quarterly dividends, he said.

Brian Brassfield, of Miami, and a partner, owned the home for more than 20 years until they sold it to Rally in 2022. He said he's excited and hopeful that Rally will be able to do good things with the home.

"It's extremely important that the home stays put and people can see it," Brassfield said. "It's one of the greatest American stories. His childhood friends and the friends he had before he went to the big leagues, they all really cared about him. They put him on a pedestal, I felt. The town itself was just a real warmhearted town and they had great stories. That's why we want this to come to fruition and share with some of the younger people how things can be. It's not that you have to have so much money to have really great memories of a childhood."

Petrozzo said as a lifelong New York Yankees fan he was excited to get a chance to be part of preserving the boyhood home of one of his favorite team's legends.

He said Rally was founded about six years ago with the idea of offering people a chance to own fractional interests in museum quality collectibles, such as Mantle's 1951 Topps Rookie Card and other collectables.

"We really started this company, myself and my cofounders, with the idea that there are these amazing collectibles, these great pieces of history that have these incredible stories, but the best stuff that we start collecting, whether its comic books or cards or any of these very nostalgic kind of items, you always wind up buying what you have access to," Petrozzo said. "The best stuff is always the most expensive, it's the hardest to find, it's the stuff you have to have connections to find and myself and my co-founders, when we started collecting, we never really had that. So we started thinking what are the things we'd really like to collect. How do we create this platform that gets all these incredible collectibles with all these great stories and make them available to everyone, so you can get equity in the best versions, the museum-quality versions."

The company started thinking about investing in real estate, but they didn't want to invest in rental properties in a hot part of the country like other investors.

"We wanted to do something that would be considered a true collectible as well as it being real estate," Petrozzo said. "So one of most collectible names in sports is obviously Mickey Mantle. This is exactly what we look for when we acquire an asset, something that has history, has a story."

Petrozzo said the home also represents Mantle's "Genesis story."

"It's the start of something big," he said. "There's nothing bigger, in my opinion as a lifelong Yankee fan, than the start of Mickey Mantle's career and this represents that. So that, to me, was an automatic."

Because of Mantle's requests to keep it in its existing condition, the home is a time capsule. Located at 319 S. Quincy St., the Mantle family purchased the property in 1934, and it remained under their ownership for over a decade. It served as the home ground for Mantle's fledgling baseball career, which led to a nearly 20-year career with the New York Yankees and winning seven World Series in the mid-20th century. He was considered perhaps the best switch-hitter in baseball history.

The original barn behind the home still leans like it did when Mantle was a kid, Brassfield said.

Brassfield said he once told Mantle he planned to try to straighten the barn out and Mantle said don't do it; it leaned like that when he was a kid.

"One story that's kind of interesting, we were restoring the home and a couple of his childhood friends, Cecil Witten and Gerald Moudy, who have passed away since this happened, told us they used to walk up near the home and watch Mickey batting from his father and grandfather who used to pitch to him," Brassfield said. "They would get to horsing around and they said Mutt, which was his dad, would turn and look at them and say if you boys are going to horse around you need to leave because Mick and I have work to do. I thought, man, does that capture everything."

Rally makes no guarantee that investors can make any money. Information on service can be accessed online.