Why Babe Ruth on Memorial Day? To memorialize the last home run Ruth ever hit on this day back in 1935. He hit three of 'em actually. Bopped them right out of Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. And he did it as a Brave! As anyone who has ever played 30 seasons in Front Page Sports Baseball '98 knows, the team a player is on when he retires is the team he goes into the Hall of Fame with. So chisel off that NY off his cap and put a script A on there instead. I know the Braves didn't move to Atlanta until over thirty years after the Babe retired. This is my twisted fantasy, I'll do what I want. Babe's a Brave! Look right here, there's proof:
See, Braves uniform. Move all those statues outta Yankee Stadium and put them in front of Turner Field where they belong. Then again the Braves promised to let him manage the team and they screwed him over so maybe we lost our Babe privileges. This card from 1962 Topps is probably the vintagiest Ruth card with a Braves logo on it that I'll ever get. Babe only lasted a couple of months with the Bravos and there are not a whole lot of contemporary memorabilia of Ruth with the Braves. Not that I could actually afford a vintage Ruth card from the '30s anyway. Here are some of the few pieces I could confirm that shows Babe as a Brave:
The 1935 Goudey 4-in-1 card is the best known. I would trade one of my kidneys for this card.
Less known, but the only other semi-mainstream card with Babe as a Brave is the 1935 4-in1 Exhibit postcard. I'm kind of shocked by the final price of that card. If I blew out some of my vintage basketball stuff I could actually maybe afford that. ?Asuuming my wife would ever let me spend the money on it. Forget the PSA-6, anyone got one in crummy condition I could buy?
These two are not actually cards, but they are the only other pieces I've ever seen from the '30s with Babe wearing a Braves cap. A 1935 Quaker Oats scorer promotion and a 1935 Quaker Oats pin. I'm not even going to say what the pin went for because it makes me sick. That could have been mine!
There are other issues from that period like the 1935 Clark's Bread Babe Ruth, but I can't find a picture of any of them to see if he's with Boston or New York. Ruth had no shortage of cards, but the year he was with the Braves wasn't a great one for collectibles. Depressions tend to mess up things like that. Thank goodness for Topps and their Ruth worship subset in 1962. The masses must remember that Ruth is a Brave!
3 comments:
I don't know, by that logic, Juan Marichal goes in the Hall as a Dodger, and the thought of that makes me want to lose a lung.
Cute post :)
He only played 28 games for them. If you asked 100 people which team Babe Ruth played for last, I'd be surprised if more than 3 told you the Braves. It would be one of sports least known and most obscure pieces of trivia.
Cute post?
Anyway, I actually have that card and I think I might have stole it from a childhood friend who had it stored in a box. Oops.
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