A Babe Ruth Jersey Goes For Big Bucks

UPDATE 5/24:  There is a rumor that LT and his agent Mark Leipseiter were notified that it was Charlie Sheen who was the winning bidder of Lawrence Taylor's Super Bowl Ring.

In an auction conducted by SCP Auctions, a well-known sports cards and memorabilia auction house, a Babe Ruth 1920 Yankees jersey closed at a whopping $4.4 million when the auction ended yesterday. This is the earliest known game-worn Ruth jersey and it is from his first season in New York. The winning bid was placed by Lelands.com, an online auction house, who plans on selling the historic jersey themselves.

A treasure like this needs to remain whole and in someone’s personal collection, I would hate to see this specific jersey end up getting chopped up and inserted in to a card.

Other amazing items included in the auction:

A 1934 Babe Ruth Yankees game-used baseball cap, which had been owned by David Wells who wore it during the 6-28-97 game against the Cleveland Indians, I guess that makes it a double game-worn cap. This sold for $537,278 in the auction.

A 1924-28 Babe Ruth game-used bat which sold for $591,007

An autographed 1968 Mickey Mantle game-worn road jersey that sold for $366.967

A 1931 Lou Gehrig game-worn home jersey for $275,706

Bobby Thompson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” cap for $173,102

Jackie Robinson’s 1950 All-Star game bat for $133,234

Also in the auction was Lawrence Taylor’s 1991 Super Bowl XXV ring for $230,401 and Dmitri Young’s card collection, which included a 1954 Hank Aaron rookie card ($537,954) and a 1955 Roberto Clemente rookie card ($432,690), which Young has said all the proceeds from his card collection sales will go to starting a foundation for kids in Ventura County.

There is an interesting story connected to the LT Super Bowl ring, current Giant Osi Umenyiora had promised that if he reached 1 million Twitter followers by Sunday he was going to bid/purchase the ring and then randomly select one of his followers to bring the ring to LT. On Saturday (5/19) when he was sitting at 50k followers he lowered the request to 500k followers. When the auction closed Sunday night Umenyiora was sitting at 52,899 followers so he never made the bid and the ring sold to another collector. This has led to a number of football fans wondering why he could not at least bid for the ring even though he fell short, i.e. - do a good deed.