Baseball Signed by First-Ever Hall of Fame Class Sells for Record Price
Nearly 80 years ago, the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Cooperstown, New York, inaugurating its first class from what at that point had already spanned 63 years of Major League Baseball history.
At that ultimate Opening Day celebration, 11 of the first 12 Hall of Famers signed a baseball, creating one of the sport’s Holy Grail keepsakes.
The only one who didn’t sign the ball? Lou Gehrig, who was too sick to attend the ceremony as ALS ravaged his body.
SCP Auctions sold the ball Saturday night, getting a record $623,369 for it.
Yes, @SCPAuctions is proud to set the new world record price for any autographed baseball. $623,369. Previous records were Babe Ruth single-signed for $388K followed by Ruth/Gehrig dual-signed for $343K. @MLB @BaseballHall #Cooperstown #WorldRecord https://t.co/I19Iqqwzrs
— SCP Auctions (@SCPAuctions) August 12, 2018
It’s not the most money ever paid for a baseball, period — that would be $3 million, paid by comic book impresario Todd McFarlane for Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball from the 1998 season a year after the home run was hit — but it’s the most paid for a signed ball at auction.
SCP Auctions president David Kohler spared no words in his pride to be part of the historic moment.
“The sheer greatness of this ball is simply unrivaled,” Kohler said. “Its historical importance compounded by the impeccable provenance and state of preservation elevate it to singular status as the most important and valuable autographed baseball in the world. The final price certainly proved this.”
Marv Owen, then a third baseman for the Chicago White Sox, collected the signatures on the ball at the original ceremony, and once he had them, he knew their significance.
The ball was stored in a fur-lined glove in a safe deposit box, protecting the signatures from the elements until Owen’s death in 1991.
The previous record price for a signed baseball at auction was $388,375, which a collector paid in 2012 for a ball signed by Babe Ruth.
If we’re using that as our baseline, an argument could be made that 10 other signatures combined were worth just 37.3 percent of the value of the baseball sold Saturday, about $24,000 each as a value-add.
Ruth, Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Cy Young, Tris Speaker, George Sisler, Walter Johnson, Connie Mack, Nap Lajoie, Eddie Collins and Grover Cleveland Alexander signed the ball.
Sports are, in general, deeply rooted in history, but with the possible exception of boxing, no sport enjoys such a relationship with its distant past as baseball.
After all, Ruth played his last game in 1935, the Black Sox scandal marks its centennial next year, and hipsters today rep the Brooklyn Dodgers so well that there’s a clothing shop in Seattle that takes its name from Ebbets Field even though the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, before most of those Brooklyn young adults’ parents and even some of their grandparents were even born.
But baseball endures, its distant past a lucrative industry for those who supply the need collectors have to own a piece of history.
We can only wonder what treasures the auction houses will unearth next.
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