A Babe Ruth jersey is the most expensive sports heirloom in history: $24 million

It is the jersey of the greatest baseball player in history, Babe Ruth, the most expensive sports relic ever: it is the jersey of the New York Yankees that the American player (real name George Herman Ruth, born in Baltimore on February 6, 1895, and died in New York on August 16, 1948) wore in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series: it was October 1 of that year and the Yankees defeated by a score of 7-5 the Chicago Cubs in front of 49.986 spectators at Chicago’s Wrigley Field stadium. The jersey was sold Sunday morning by Heritage Auctions for $24.12 million (21.6 million euros) after a bidding battle that lasted as long as six hours.

Babe Ruth thus ousts another Yankees legend, Mickey Mantle, from the throne of the most expensive sports heirloom in history: it was 2022 when again Heritage Auctions sold a high-quality specimen of a 1952 Topps Rookie card (these are collectible sports cards) by Mantle, which went for $12.6 million.The player kept the jersey for years after his retirement and eventually gave it to a golfer friend in Florida in the 1940s. The jersey then remained with the lucky recipient’s daughter until the 1990s, when a sports auction pioneer traveled to Florida to purchase the jersey for a five-figure sum. The jersey was immediately sold in private negotiations to an unknown collector, who kept it in his collection until it was auctioned in 2005 and sold for $940,000. It then remained in a private collection before being transferred to Heritage auction house, and now to a new owner who owns 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,” says Ivy. “It is clear from the strong participation in the auction and the record price achieved that savvy collectors have no doubt what this Ruth jersey is and what it represents.”

Ruth’s fifth-inning home run against the Chicago Cubs during Game 3 of the 1932 World Series. the so-called “Called Shot,” “has been debated, disproved, reconsidered and investigated for nearly a century,” wrote Joe Posnanski in the 2023 bestseller Why We Love Baseball. That moment in the fifth inning when Ruth made a gesture toward something or someone, perhaps the Chicago Cubs’ bullpen (that’s why it’s called a “called shot”), or the center field flagpole, has been celebrated, imitated and replicated endlessly for the past 92 years. That home run, which came on a two-strike count, has been depicted in paintings, depicted in movies, and repeated even by amateur baseball players to the point of exhaustion. A pitch, in short, that has become legendary for fans of the sport-that, too, has contributed to the fame and value of the jersey.

A Babe Ruth jersey is the most expensive sports heirloom in history: $24 million

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