Babe Ruth road jersey fetches $4.4 million at auction

SPORTS MEMORABILIA:BABE RUTH'S first season with the New York Yankees, 1920, is still reverberating. He batted .376, hit 54 home runs and drove in 137 runs. Attendance at the Polo Grounds more than doubled to 1.29 million. It was the season when the future Yankees dynasty began to take shape.

Ruth wore a gray wool road jersey that season to perform in Boston, St Louis, Chicago, Cleveland and the three other American League cities. “Ruth, G.H.” is still visible on the collar in faded pink script. Blue letters spell “New York” across the chest. Dirt stains – and probably some from sweat – are visible.

And now, it is the most expensive sports artifact ever sold at auction. The jersey was bought on Sunday for $4.4 million (€3.4 million), nearly quadruple the previous high for a piece of Ruth memorabilia: the bat he used to hit the first home run at Yankee Stadium on April 18th, 1923. That went for only $1.265 million. “To see this jersey bring in $4.4 million is shocking,” said Leila Dunbar, an appraiser and former Sotheby’s executive whose specialties include sports memorabilia. “The record for a Ruth jersey before was $1.025 million. For some reason, there’s been a dramatic rise in the value of jerseys the past year.”

At $4.4 million, the jersey exceeds the $2.8 million paid for a T206 Honus Wagner card, the $3 million for Mark McGwire’s record 70th home run ball in 1998, and the $4.3 million paid in 2010 for the 13 rules of basketball set down on two yellowed typewritten pages by James Naismith.

Only $77,158 separates the prices for the Ruth jersey and the Naismith rules, two very different historical pieces. A Ruth artifact made of paper – the six-page sale contract that sent him to the Yankees from the Boston Red Sox in late 1919 – was bought for $996,000 seven years ago.

Ruth is central to the modern sports memorabilia marketplace even if he predated car shows and QVC appearances. He revolutionised baseball with his power, his charisma and his Rabelaisian appetites. Everything about him suggested that he was his own reality show.

It is almost as if Ruth is still alive and preparing to compete in the July 4th hot dog eating contest in Coney Island. He is still a sports icon. And while he signed innumerable balls during his career and until he died in 1948, there are few of his game-used bats, caps or uniforms in existence.

“This is the holy grail of sports memorabilia,” said David Kohler, the president of SCP Auctions, which sold the 1920 Ruth jersey to Lelands, another auction house, which plans to resell it to a private buyer for what its president said would be another record.

Kohler added: “This is the finest authenticated jersey – and the best piece of sports memorabilia – we’ve ever sold.” How much Ruth wore the jersey cannot be answered. But there was no memorabilia market for him to enrich himself by selling his uniforms.

Chris Ivy, the director of sports auctions at Heritage Auctions, said: “The common belief is that players had two road and two home jerseys. They’d wear one, while the other was sent to the laundry. And they’d use the past season’s uniforms during spring training.”

At some point in Ruth’s flannel annals, his pants took a walk, leaving the more valuable jersey behind. Dunbar said the woollen legwear might have fetched another $100,000.

Michael Heffner, the president of Lelands, said that despite the uncertain economy, buyers were willing to pay seemingly absurd amounts for the best memorabilia. In the art world, where the numbers are even more breathtaking, one of the four copies of the Edvard Munch masterpiece The Scream, sold for $119.90 million. Heffner said he would rather have the jersey to display.

“The closer you get to the player, the more the value of the piece,” he said. “The bat is worth so much. The cap is worth so much. But the jersey he wore, well, they retire the jersey. Not the bat.” Still, a size 7 3/8 Ruth cap owned by the former Yankees pitcher David Wells performed as if it were a Ruth bat on Sunday at SCP’s auction. Wells paid $35,000 for the 1930s-era cap and wore it in the first inning of a game in 1997. It sold for $537,278 – more than a 1927-28 Ruth bat, which fetched $491,007.

The search is on, of course, for the next great Ruth artifact, if it exists. “It would be great to find one of his Boston Red Sox uniforms,” Kohler said. New York Times