Sports Auction

Babe Ruth 1932 jersey (front).

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST September 2, 2024

It’s hard to miss the extent to which artworld practices and lingo have taken over elsewhere in the culture. Almost always, of course, when collectible material is produced. As on Sunday August 11^th 2024 there was a full-page ad in the New York Times for an auction of Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot”. The text read:  The jersey the Bambino was wearing during one of the most iconic moments in sports history visits Heritage Auctions – New York. Estimate $30,000.000+

Well, even for the artworld proper that would have been a handsome figure but a call to Chris Ivy, the specialist in charge at Heritage, established that the actual estimate was thirty to forty million. So we arranged to meet at Heritage on Madison. There I made an advance walkabout of the baseball section, which was lined with dummies wearing baseball sweaters, such as a Le Bron James whose sweater was described as “game worn” and “photo matched”, a mode of establishing authenticity, and tagged at $400,000, and a Ted Williams clutching a used and signed Home Run Bat, tagged at $300,000.

The uniforms which they are wearing, the bats they are holding, will be in the Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction which was at Heritage on August 23rd through the 25^th and the figures with which they are tagged are the low estimates. So the the millions with which Babe Ruth sweater have been tagged aren’t a just a wishdream but informed speculation within an established field.

Babe Ruth 1932 jersey (back).

When did the collecting of baseball memorabilia get so organized, I asked Ivy later.

“Obviously when this stuff was originally used, like the Babe Ruth jersey in 1932, it had no intrinsic value,” he said. “They would use the jersey again for spring training until they just fell apart. So obviously there are very few examples left from that period. They didn’t have any intrinsic value until there was a secondary market created for them by collectors. And I would say that was in the early to mid 1970s. So as a collectible group it’s fairly young. The market evolved. Sports cars, which I would consider the initial backbone, wss most people’s entry point into sports collectibles."

How big is the collector base?

“There are forty different collectible categories. And we’ve got just about 1.8 million clients at this point. These are people who have participated in our auctions over the past 40 years, either as consignors or as bidders. It’s a good amount.”

Heritage also deals with basketball; football and golf memorabilia, but baseball rules. “It’s got the longest history,” Ivy says. “Baseball collectibles probably represent 65 percent of the total sports collectible market. I would say that in New York, the Yankees probably represent 50 to 55 percent becsuse the Yankees have the most storied history. They’ve won the most championships of any baseball team with players like Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio.

Do they hang them at home?

“Yeah. And a lot of collectors loan them out to museums There’s a Jackie Robinson museum here in New York city that has several significsnt pieces from Jackie’s career that we’ve sold. There’s the Yankees Museum in Yankee Stadium, there’s msterial loaned to thr Baseball Hall of Fame. So people do loan out the high end pieces. The Smithsonian Museum currently has an exhibit in Washington DC. So people will loan out high end pieces, or show them in their home or display them at their office.” And just where Babe Ruth’s multimlllion dollar sweater ends up we will perhaps shortly learn. WM