Bloomberg Business Week
By DAVID GINSBURG
Sept. 28,2011
Much like the icon it depicts, the 1914 Babe Ruth baseball card is renowned for a variety of reasons.
For a collector, it's a unique treasure worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is the first Babe Ruth card, and fewer than a dozen are known to be in existence.
"It's right up there with the holy grail of baseball cards," said Brian Fleisher of Beckett Media, one of the nation's foremost authorities of sports collectibles.
Collectors consider it to be the Babe Ruth rookie card, even though at the time he was a 19-year-old pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles of the International League.
To Glenn Davis, the card represents a loving link with his grandfather and father. Arch Davis sold newspapers on the streets of Baltimore in 1914, and the Ruth card was among a series inserted in the old Baltimore News. Arch Davis kept a set of the cards and passed it along to his son, Richard, who loaned the set to the Babe Ruth Museum.
After Richard Davis died, his son, Glenn, determined it was best to keep the cards at the museum. That is where they are today, in a glass case just a few yards away from the room where Ruth slept as a child.
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