This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 5/25/2012
One of the more esoteric items in the long line of cherished cardboard ephemera hailing from the country's premier baseball newspaper, The Sporting News, this circa 1917-1920 supplement to "The Bible of Baseball" was produced by Chicago-based printer Felix Mendelsohn, the very same publisher who first designed and developed the landmark M101-5 and M101-4 sets just a few years earlier. Those prior Felix Mendelsohn sets were offered in pages of The Sporting News in 1916 for just $1, or $2.50 for a complete uncut sheet, and they are now world famous because of their inclusion of the coveted Babe Ruth rookie card. The following year, Mendelsohn began work on a slightly larger 2-1/4" by 4" prototype set that would feature stars of yesteryear, but he would eventually settle on an even larger set of cards that summer that measured 4-3/8" by 6-3/8" and featured active players. These larger cards were first offered in advertisements in The Sporting News in 1917 at $5 for 100 pictures, a relatively hefty price at the time equivalent to about $300 in today's terms, which may explain their elevated scarcity over the years. So scarce are the M101-6 Sporting News supplements, in fact, that the complete checklist remains a mystery, while at least four variations of players representing two different teams have been documented. Foremost among those players, of course, and the key card to the set, is none other than Boston's unusually talented teenage twirler, George Herman, "Babe" Ruth, known then also simply as "Jidge," a common nickname for George, or "The Big Fellow," or simply "Bam." Ruth had earned his more famous moniker a few years earlier when he first signed with the minor league Baltimore Orioles as a 19 year-old. Owner and manager Jack Dunn had to become Ruth's legal guardian in order to complete the contract because the age of majority was still 21, and so Ruth became "Jack Dunn's baby," a name that followed him to Boston after both the A's and Reds passed on deals involving the young pitcher. In Boston, "The Babe" appeared in a handful of games in 1914, but he would tab an impressive 78-40 record between 1915 and 1918, winning the World Series in 1915, 1916, and 1918. The following year he would appear as a pitcher in only 17 of his 130 games played, and he would set his first of four single season home run marks, swatting 29 circuit clouts and breaking Ned Williamson's then record of 27, which he set in 1884. Clearly, "The Big Fellow" had begun to change the game, and by extension American culture itself, but Boston would only witness it for a year, as owner Harry Frazee would be forced to sell Ruth to the New York Yankees rather than meet his demands for a significant salary increase after swatting all those long flies. The rest, as they say, is history, and it is one of the loftiest and most colorful and celebrated histories ever recorded, a history that begins right here with this very issue. Indeed, no other Ruth collectible in existence, save maybe for the contract marking his sale to the Yankees, more succinctly and eloquently represents this historical transition in Ruth's career. When the M101-6 baseball cards were first offered in the early summer of 1917, Ruth was still with Boston in his primary role as pitcher, and the image on the supplement was by necessity a file image from Boston's championship 1916 season, just a year after Ruth's rookie campaign, and the same year as his actual rookie card from the aforementioned 1916 M101-5 and M101-4 sets. And so for three full years, from 1917 to 1919, Felix Mendelsohn produced the M101-6 set showing "Ruth" as "P. Boston Red Sox," and while advanced hobbyists have tended to favor this Boston variation because of its association with Boston's final World Series championships of the century, simple math suggests that it is about three times as common as the later New York Yankees variation produced in 1920. Following his sale to the Yankees on Dec. 26, 1919, Ruth would then appear in the final year of the M101-6 set as ""Babe" Ruth C.F. Yankees." The fact that he still appears in his original Boston flannels from his rookie period certainly adds a level of desirability to the piece, but seeing the word "Yankees" on the updated supplement for its final year of issue in 1920 must have undoubtedly split the hearts of Boston fans in two, perhaps contributing to the fabled "Curse of the Bambino" that would prevent Boston from winning another World Series for the next century. Graded PSA 5.5 EX+, the offered example ranks as the highest-graded Ruth specimen of either variation on record in the hobby, and it ranks among the top three highest graded examples ever graded from the entire set, tied with a relatively high-grade example of Carson Bigbee in the same EX+ 5.5 class, and out-shined only by a single example of Frank Snyder graded EX/MT+ 6.5. In sum, this is a near perfectly preserved example of an utterly impossible issue to find in anything approaching NM condition. To be more precise, this cardboard anomaly appears to have completely escaped the ravages of time, showing strong NM to even MINT features in all facets except for its top and right edges and top right corner, which show very minor and perhaps even natural factory wear that could easily have occurred during the printing process. Every other feature quite literally glitters, from its pristine image of the rookie pitcher to its predominantly clean white back and still shimmering surface gloss. Proudly offered by Mile High Card Company, the hobby's single highest graded example of Babe Ruth's first baseball card with the New York Yankees.