Posted 7 years ago
bandit66
(1 item)
Has anyone seen one of these. It is a picture of babe Ruth wen he was in school at St. Mary's . Babe Ruth with the boys of an industrial school band. My wife has had it for a few years.
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I own some similar items of Babe Ruth. The "companies" (probably a one to two person operation) that made these would cut images out of yearly baseball guides from Spalding, Reach and in this case, Whitman. Some other "companies" that made these are VSA (Vintage Sports Authority) and AAA (not sure what this acronym is for). We can only guess that the page numbers and the guide it came from and the year are correct on the label, because who's to say anything about regulation with these. The companies/people who made these are not detectable from their websites. I've heard it was something that was done in the '90s with the huge baseball card craze, and they would be sold at card shows. And that's right around the time grading cards started becoming a thing.
It does offer a low-cost option to get period Babe Ruth memorabilia, however, and they are from the actual guides from the actual year (if we can believe the labels, and in most cases I do). This one is said to be from page 43 or the Whitman guide/magazine in 1930. I never understood why there's a grade on these because they were cut, so they're grading their own ability to use an X-acto knife.
What I love about these is that they display images that would forever be forgotten about if they remained inside a baseball guide/magazine.
If you look up "Babe Ruth magazine cut" or "Babe Ruth guide cut" on eBay you'll find a range of prices that are not very high. There's value in the history and seeing images you may have never seen before, however. I'm all for having options for getting cheaper, period Babe Ruth memorabilia, so I'm a fan of these. I just wish there was some kind of regulation behind them.