This Babe Ruth 1914 Rookie Card Just Sold for $7.2 Million

Babe Ruth is considered to be one of the most important baseball players ever. Now a trading card featuring Ruth’s likeness is one of the most valuable sports cards ever.

A Baltimore News card from Ruth’s rookie season in 1914 hammered down at auction for $7.2 million, ESPN reported on Monday morning. That makes it the third-most-expensive sports card ever sold and the most expensive Ruth item of all time.

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“He transcends everything,” Brian Dwyer, the president of Robert Edward Auctions, told ESPN. “We think the Ruth is the most significant card and it has not had its moment in the sun yet, so to speak.”

The original card was collected by a 16-year-old paperboy in Baltimore named Archibald Davis. At the time, the teen kept baseball cards of his favorite Orioles—then part of the minor International League—and he was enamored with the one showing Ruth, a 19-year-old pitcher. Davis’s collection was passed down through his family for 107 years, being loaned to Baltimore’s Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in 1998. The 15 cards were displayed there until 2021, when they were sold to a private collector.

“Overall, the card was pretty well preserved; the fact that it was in the hands of the museum for the last twenty-plus years helped keep it in the condition that it’s in,” Dwyer said. “It’s one of only 10 that we know to exist.”

The Ruth rookie card wasn’t known to have existed until the 1980s, ESPN noted, and it was considered the most valuable sports card as recently as the late aughts. The version sold on Monday was the first one to come up for sale in a decade, and the one prior crossed the auction block for a mere $450,000.

The $7.2 million price tag is a much more impressive number, and it comes just short of the $7.25 million paid for a T206 Sweet Caporal Honus Wagner card in August 2022. Both of those pieces have a ways to go, though, when it comes to the most valuable sports card: a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card that scored $12.6 million that same time last year. Those other two cards, though, are much more abundant than the Ruth card.

“It’s easier to buy an NFL team in the last decade than it has been to buy one of these cards,” Dwyer said about the pitcher’s rookie card.

A football team may be more expensive, but it’s got nothing on Ruth in terms of rarity.

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