George Herman (Babe) Ruth, Big League Chewing Gum, Goudey Gum Co., 1933.
A mint condition Babe Ruth baseball card from 1933 (not the one pictured here) is up for auction and could break the $5.2 million record recently set by a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle. That sale broke the record set last year by a Mike Trout 2009 Bowman Chrome Draft Prospects Superfractor card which sold for $3.936 million dollars.
I started collecting baseball and football cards back in the late 1940s. Fortunately, my parents did not throw them all out when I went to college. In the ’50s my brother and I used to comb all the mom-and-pop corner stores in Cleveland Heights, Ohio looking for the latest release from Bowman and eventually Topps. I still maintain my interest in these classics.
NPR reports on the upcoming Babe Ruth sale, writing:
As a 10-year-old in the 1950s Thomas Newman did what other boys his age did: he collected baseball cards.
Over a couple of years Newman assembled a treasured collection that was not equally prized by his mother, who thought of the cards as garbage and tossed them out. The loss inspired a decades-long passion to recoup what he’d lost. And then some.
“My dad began collecting in the early 1980s starting with baseball cards from 1957 and 1959 when he was ten to twelve years old,” his son Stewart Newman said. “Those were replacements for the treasured cards of his youth that he kept in shoeboxes as a youngster and that his mom later threw out.”
(Rear) George Herman (Babe) Ruth, Big League Chewing Gum, Goudey Gum Co., 1933.
Eventually Newman, who died from COVID-19 in January, traveled the country piecing together an extensive stockpile of baseball and other sports memorabilia that auctioneers estimate is now worth about $20 million. And next month, they’ll be up for auction via Memory Lane Auctions from June 21 through July 10.
The sale will include an mint-condition 1933 Babe Ruth card that could become the most expensive of all time. Memory Lane Auctions President JP Cohen described the “Sultan of Swat” card, one of four in the world, as “the finest known of its kind.”
The iconic Goudey trading card, which bears the number 53, depicts Ruth wearing the New York Yankees’s pinstripes, swinging a bat against a yellow background. It originally came with a stick of gum. Eighty-eight years later it received a Grade 9 rating from the Professional Sports Authentication service, meaning it is in mint condition and close to perfect, Barron’s reported.
Read more here.
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