Rare Babe Ruth card to remain in Baltimore following multimillion-dollar sale

Listen to this article

A 1914 Babe Ruth rookie baseball card, currently on loan to the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum in Baltimore, has been sold with 14 other 1914 Baltimore Orioles cards for millions.

The sale comes after the resolution of a family legal dispute that came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 1914 Ruth card is thought to be among the most valuable baseball cards in existence, with a 2009 Forbes Magazine article claiming the card had surpassed the value of the T206 Honus Wagner card, which was the first baseball card to sell for over $1 million. The article claimed that a Ruth rookie card in near-mint condition could go for as much as $5 million, while a Wagner card in the same condition would be worth $3 million (in fact, multiple Wagner cards of varying conditions have now sold for greater than that amount).

This is largely due to the rarity of the 1914 Ruth cards; only around 10 exist. The Ruth rookie cards, along with cards displaying other members of the then-minor league Baltimore Orioles, were distributed locally, rather than nationally, as inserts in the Baltimore News, a local newspaper that later became the Baltimore News-American before folding in 1986.

The exact terms of the sale of the 1914 Ruth rookie card were not disclosed, nor was the identity of the buyer. A loan agreement between the cards’ previous owner, Geraldine Davis, and the museum requires the cards stay at the museum until at least March 2023. But Michael Gibbons, the museum’s historian and director emeritus, said he believes the buyer will allow the museum to keep the cards on display beyond that point.

“I think the (new) owner, if everything is kosher, would be looking for a longer-term display opportunity here,” Gibbons said. “I think he gets it like we get it: This is a good place for the Babe Ruth rookie card to be seen, because this is his museum.”

The museum, which focuses on Babe Ruth’s childhood in Baltimore and his short tenure as an Orioles pitcher before being sold to the Boston Red Sox, will display the card alongside other artifacts, like Ruth’s marriage certificate to Helen Woodford, whom he wed at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Ellicott City. The museum also holds the scorebook from Ruth’s first Orioles game, in which the O’s beat the Buffalo Bisons 6-0.

“It’s remarkable that that exists,” Gibbons said. “You put that next to the rookie card and, wow. That tells the story.”

The museum had previously had another copy of the card on display in 1996 — one with a blue, rather than red border — but the owner decided to auction it off a few years later. When that card first arrived at the museum, little was known about it; even historians at the National Baseball Hall of Fame weren’t familiar with the Baltimore News collection, Gibbons recalled.

Since then, the card’s notoriety has grown significantly. An earlier sale of another 1914 Babe Ruth rookie card, which was considered in “good” condition, occurred in 2012; the card went for $575,000, according to reporting in Sports Collectors Daily.

The sale of the Ruth card follows a lawsuit filed by a relative of the card’s former owner.

The card, along with hundreds of other baseball cards, was originally owned by the late Archibald Davis, who was had been a paperboy in the 1910s, delivering copies of the Baltimore News. The collection had been in the possession of Davis’ son, Richard, from 1952 until 1998, when Richard Davis first loaned the collection to the museum.

At the time, the 1914 Ruth card was appraised at only $7,500.

Since Richard passed away in 2001, the cards have belonged to his widow, Geraldine Davis, who is now in her 90s.

Richard Davis’ sister, Virginia Markiewicz, sued Geraldine and Richard’s son, Glenn, whom Geraldine had given the power of attorney, when she learned from the museum that the cards were going to be sold. She felt she had ownership over the cards due to Archibald Davis’ will stating that his estate should “be divided equally” between the two children, though the will did not specifically reference the cards.

A judge eventually granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment due to Markiewicz’s claims being time-barred; she had first learned her brother, Richard Davis, was claiming ownership of the cards from a Baltimore Sun article in 1998, but took no legal action until 2020. The statute of limitations for conversion in Maryland is three years.

The case turned into an extremely rare scenario in which being sued actually benefited the defendant, according to Richard Burch of Mudd, Harrison & Burch in Towson, who defended Glenn Davis.

That’s because the collection’s buyer, who first made an offer of approximately $1.5 million in early 2020 for just the single Ruth card, offered a higher sum for the whole collection after the legal proceedings concluded.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told a client that being sued was a godsend in the form of millions of dollars,” Burch said. “I think what happened was that the buyer wanted this card collection so badly that he effectively decided he was going to pay whatever it took to get this collection.”

While the price the buyer paid for the collection is not public, the loan agreement between Geraldine Davis and the museum estimates its total cost as $5 million.

The sale of the cards has officially gone through; the buyer will be selling a portion of the card to a syndication company, with details to be announced at a Wednesday morning press conference at the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum.

The Ruth card isn’t the only significant baseball card sale to occur this year; in fact, the hobby of sports card trading has exploded since the pandemic’s onset, with the doldrums of social distancing and stay-at-home orders causing many to unearth long-forgotten collections in their basements or attics.

“The trend took off from there, and trading cards soon became the most popular alternative asset class thanks to their liquidity, simplicity and a healthy dose of nostalgia,” wrote Axios’ Jeff Tracy in March of this year. Over the eight months preceding the article, seven of the 10 most valuable card sales of all time occurred.