The New York Yankees legend’s jersey, photo-matched to baseball’s most famous moment, dethrones Mickey Mantle’s 1952 Topps card that sold for $12.6 million at Heritage in 2022
PRESS RELEASE
DALLAS, Texas (August 25, 2024) – Almost 90 years after he retired from baseball, Babe Ruth continues to smash his way into the history books.
After a thrilling bidding war that lasted more than six hours, the New York Yankees jersey Babe Ruth wore when he called his shot to deep center field in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series sold early Sunday morning at Heritage Auctions for $24,120,000 to become the world’s most valuable sports collectible.
Ruth knocks fellow Yankees legend Mickey Mantle out of the record books, where he’d been since August 2022. That’s when Heritage sold a high-grade example of Mantle’s iconic 1952 Topps card for $12.6 million.
Ruth’s “Called Shot” jersey, the centerpiece of Heritage’s ongoing Summer Platinum Night Sports Auction, was recently photo-matched by several third parties, including Professional Sports Authenticator and MeiGray Authenticated. The match used two photos from Getty Images and a third from The Chicago Daily News showing Ruth, Lou Gehrig and manager Joe McCarthy in the Wrigley Field dugout on Oct. 1, 1932.
Those photos were taken before and after that legendary game, where Ruth hit two home runs – including his “Called Shot,” the final homer Ruth hit in World Series play.
Ruth held on to the jersey for years following his retirement and eventually gifted it to a golfing friend in Florida in the 1940s. It remained with that lucky recipient’s daughter until the 1990s, when an early sports auction pioneer traveled to Florida to buy the jersey for a six-figure sum. The jersey was immediately sold privately to an unknown collector, who kept it in his collection until it was consigned to auction in 2005 – as a “1932 Babe Ruth New York Yankees Game-Used Road Flannel Jersey Attributed To the Called Shot” – where it sold for $940,000.
It remained in a private collection before heading to Heritage – and now, to a new owner who possesses what Heritage’s Director of Sports, Chris Ivy, calls “the most significant piece of American sports memorabilia ever offered at auction.”
“It has been an honor and a privilege to work with this incredible piece of American history, and I am proud that it will now be part of one of the finest private collections in the world,” Ivy says. “It is clear by the strong auction participation and record price achieved that astute collectors have no doubt as to what this Ruth jersey is and what it represents. The legend of Babe Ruth and the myth and mystery surrounding his ‘called shot’ are united in this one extraordinary artifact.”
Ruth’s fifth-inning home run against the Chicago Cubs during Game 3 of the 1932 World Series “has been argued about and debunked and reconsidered and investigated for almost a century,” Joe Posnanski wrote in 2023’s bestselling Why We Love Baseball. The Called Shot, as it’s been known ever since Babe’s swing met Cubs pitcher Charlie Root’s pitch that first day of October in Chicago — three little words about which endless stories have been told ever since.
That moment in the fifth inning when Ruth gestured toward something or someone — perhaps the Chicago Cubs’ dugout, Root or the center field flagpole — has been endlessly celebrated, imitated and replicated over the last 92 years. That home run, which came on a two-strike count, has been depicted in paintings, exaggerated in movies and parroted by anyone who’s ever played beer-league ball on a rec-league field.
Those three little words, The Called Shot, will live so long as there’s someone left to tell stories about the day Ruth smashed a baseball farther than anyone had ever before hit a baseball at Wrigley Field, where Heritage took the jersey on July 23 for a homecoming celebrated by players and fans alike.
In the 1948 book The Babe Ruth Story (a collaboration with journalist Bob Considine), the legend had become fact, as far as Ruth was concerned. He called that home run “the most famous one I ever hit.”
To that legend, Heritage Auctions proudly offers another chapter.
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