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Babe Ruth rookie card belonging to Danvers man sells for more than $800K at auction
The card, discovered in a chance encounter at a yard sale, sold for more than five times its starting bid.
An extremely rare Babe Ruth rookie card belonging to a Danvers man, who discovered its value last month in a chance encounter, just sold for $812,724 in an auction — over five times its starting bid.
Babe Ruth card
The baseball card, which started at $150,000 and received 36 bids, is from 1916. Robert Edward Auction House, a sports auction house that handled the sale, expected it to garner at least $500,000, though the final number came in over $300,000 higher.
The card is the one of a series of what are known as “Morehouse cards.”
In 1916, a 200-card set was designed by a Chicago-area publisher and distributed to companies around the U.S., the idea being that the cards would be used by the businesses for promotional purposes. Morehouse Baking Company, in Lawrence, included cards with each loaf of its “Sunlight” bread, which could later be redeemed for prizes. Anyone who collected 50 unique iterations of the cards, which were marketed to children, could turn them in to Morehouse and receive a baseball and bat or a jump rope.
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Morehouse cards, today, are hard to come by, and this is the first time a Morehouse Ruth card has been sold at auction. The man from Danvers had 119 of them in his collection, including the one that just sold, which Robert Edward Auctions described as “exceedingly rare.”
“This is a very distinctive example of Babe Ruth’s rookie card, universally regarded as one of the most significant cards in all of card collecting,” Robert Edward Auctions wrote on its website.
The Danvers man, who has chosen to remain anonymous, only realized the value of what he had when he happened upon a yard sale Jeff Gross, an avid card collector from Newburyport, was helping his wife run at her childhood home in Danvers. They got to talking, and the man asked Gross to help him determine the value of his cards. His jaw “dropped” when he realized what he had on his hands, the man said to The Boston Globe in November.
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The auction included 91 other Morehouse cards, which, combined with the Ruth card, brought in a collective $980,000, said P.J. Kinsella, Robert Edward Auctions’ communications director. One, a “Shoeless” Joe Jackson card, started at $5,000 and sold for $87,000. A Jim Thorpe card, one of “only a handful” of cards of the New York Giants player, was sold for $24,000, and a set of 76 Morehouse cards went for $21,000.
A second Ruth card and some other duplicates are still to be sold at an auction in the spring.
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