A rare 1914 Baltimore News Babe Ruth rookie card fetched $7.2 million on Monday when it sold through Robert Edward Auctions, becoming the third-most expensive sports card in history.
The card was first owned by 16-year-old Baltimore paperboy Archibald Davis, who collected cards depicting players from his favorite team, the International League Orioles, which came in the daily papers, according to a report.
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One day in 1914, he picked up the now-$7.2 million card depicting a 19-year-old George Herman "Babe" Ruth.
Davis would collect 15 cards, and they were passed down through his family for 107 years before the family loaned the cards to the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum in 1998.
They stood on display in the Baltimore museum until 2021, when they were then sold in private, according to the report.
"Overall, the card was pretty well preserved — the fact that it was in the hands of the museum for the last 20-plus years helped keep it in the condition that it's in," Brian Dwyer, the president of Robert Edward Auctions, said.
"It's one of only 10 that we know to exist," he said.
While the card might not carry the same lore as the Topps Mantle and the T206 Wagner, the Baltimore News Ruth was deemed the most valuable sports card as recently as the late 2000s, the report noted.
"Ruth himself has mythology behind him; people don't realize he was made a ward of St. Mary's Industrial School at 7, under the custody and control of the priests of St. Mary's Industrial School until [then Orioles manager] Jack Dunn saw Ruth playing and became his legal guardian," Dwyer said.
"With this card, you have Ruth having been a ward of the state for more than two-thirds of his life, not knowing much about the world and certainly not knowing what he was going to become. [That's] what this card symbolizes," Robert Edward Auctions's president said.
The existence of the Baltimore News Ruth was not widely known until the 1980s, according to Dwyer.
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"When we sold the record-setting Wagner at $6.6 million [in 2021], and we had people coming up to us asking, 'Who is Honus Wagner and why should we care?'" he said.
"Not a single person asks who Babe Ruth is, what his significance to the game is, to the hobby, or frankly, to American culture," Dwyer said. "He transcends everything. We think the Ruth is the most significant card, and it has not had its moment in the sun yet, so to speak."