CLEVELAND — At the National Sports Collectors Convention this week, one item will sit proudly as the centerpiece of the Heritage Auctions booth. This crown jewel seems destined to obliterate the record for the most valuable piece of sports memorabilia ever sold.
It's billed as the jersey Babe Ruth wore when, according to baseball lore, he called his shot in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, by motioning to center field and then blasting a home run in the same direction over the wall at Wrigley Field.
Thanks to advances in photo-matching — the art of comparing unique characteristics in game-worn items with photographs to ascertain whether or not something is indeed authentic — game-used collectibles have skyrocketed. Matching a jersey to a specific game could multiply its value as much as 50 times over.
When Heritage announced it had been consigned the "Called Shot" jersey in late May, the auction house placed an estimate of $30 million on the item. For context, that's roughly three times the all-time auction record price for a jersey -- the $10.1 million paid at Sotheby's in September 2022 for Michael Jordan's jersey from Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals.
Connecting the jersey to Ruth's most famous home run is everything. After all, the record for a Ruth jersey is $5.64 million, the price paid at Hunt Auctions in 2019 for a shirt "The Bambino"' wore for a range of games between 1928 and 1930.
Given the stakes, this photo-match automatically became the most important in collecting history, one Heritage immediately stood behind.
Said Chris Ivy, director of sports auctions for the company, "We are confident beyond a shadow of a doubt that this jersey is exactly as described and listed for auction."
There is, however, some doubt, and it comes from one of the most respected photo-matching companies in the industry.
Tracing the jersey's history
The jersey's origins can be traced to a Florida woman who said Ruth gave her father the jersey to pay off a golf bet.
In 1990, she sold it to Grey Flannel Auctions co-founder Andy Imperato, who later sold it to a private collector for $150,000.
That collector consigned it back to Grey Flannel in 1999. In that auction, it was described as a Ruth road uniform from 1930, and it sold for $284,000. The collector loaned it to the Babe Ruth Museum as such.
Six years later, the jersey went back to auction at Grey Flannel again. This time, the jersey was no longer billed as being from 1930. It was instead listed as being used in 1932, and it became the "Called Shot" jersey.
By looking at the hand-cut and sewn "New York" on the front of Ruth's jersey, including "the curvature of the 'W,' the skew of the 'E' and the positioning of the 'Y,'" Grey Flannel felt comfortable saying it matched to Game 3. The auction house drove it home further by having uniform expert Mark Okkonen weigh in.
"Based on the photo evidence (Grey Flannel) provided, I have every reason to believe the Babe Ruth road jersey in your possession does indeed represent the 1932 season and had to have been worn by 'The Bambino' when he connected with his famous 'Called Shot' home run in the 1932 World Series at Chicago," Okkonen said in the auction description.
The assessment of the jersey did not please all, including Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller, who said the old timers wore more jerseys than had been suggested.
"If people want to throw their money away, they should go to Las Vegas," Feller told the New York Daily News. "At least in Las Vegas, you get a good meal."
"I'm not saying they are wrong," Baseball Hall of Fame curator Ted Spencer also told the paper. "But they play it a little looser than we do."
The augmented description paid off, as the buyer tripled his money (in just six years) when the jersey sold for $940,000 in 2005 to Dr. Richard Angrist, an ophthalmologist from New Jersey.
Since then, Angrist has sought to make the match even more definitive.
Angrist is the classic game-used collector who does his own work behind-the-scenes and presents what he sees to the photo-matching companies. In his only public interview on the topic, Angrist told a writer from the American Society of Ophthalmic and Plastic Reconstruction Surgery (ASOPRS) he utilizes the services of a two-time Emmy award-winning producer, editor, director and videographer.
In 2021, Angrist brought the jersey to the Yankees, and the team displayed it at Yankee Stadium as the "Called Shot" jersey.
Angrist also sent the jersey three times to Resolution Photomatching (2019, 2021 and 2022), one of the leading companies in high-end jersey matching. All three reviews by the company resulted in a conclusion of "no match."
In Nov. 2022, Angrist then brought the jersey to End-To-End, a nascent photo-matching service started in 2021 by a young data scientist named Blake Panarisi. At the time, the company had not matched a single high-profile jersey sold at auction.
End-To-End matched the jersey to the "Called Shot," but due to its lack of experience in the area, End-To-End alone would not have been enough to bring the Ruth jersey to market.
The additional confirmation came 17 months later, in April 2024, when the company with the longest tenure in photo-matching, MeiGray, returned a match. Angrist got a further boost when, that same month, PSA brought on Panarisi to lead its photo-matching.
PSA then made the Ruth shirt the first jersey match in its history.
It is common for consignors and auction houses to "shop around" authentication services, and if an authenticator fails it, the consignor or auction house moves on and doesn't disclose the initial failing grade.
Heritage's auction listing refers to the jersey as "twice authenticated, including by MeiGray Authenticated, which says the jersey was matched using two photos from Getty Images and a third from The Chicago Daily News."
The listing does not mention that Resolution Photomatching could not definitively match the jersey in its three attempts to authenticate it.
“We passed up a very large sum of money and exponentially more value in publicity on this," Resolution founder John Robinson told cllct. "We knew our very high-end client would be upset, and that if we didn't photo-match it, our competitors would get the opportunity.
"We would have loved nothing more than to have been able to call this a ResMatch. We’re always incentivized to call something a ResMatch, and do everything possible to do that for every item. But we’re always objective first, and in this case, to our great disappointment, the evidence didn’t allow that determination.”
Even though Resolution has photo-matched several million-dollar jerseys for Heritage, Ivy said "their supposed opinion of it is of no relevance in the matter."
Interestingly, Angrist owns Ruth's home jersey from the first two games of the 1932 World Series, and he used Resolution to photo-match that item.
To be clear, whether ethical or not, it is a standard practice in the business for an auction house to omit an opinion that does not favor a better sale.
The question is, in the most important photo-match in the hobby's history, with an item that is on track to be the highest-priced piece of sports memorabilia ever sold, is it critical everyone is on the same page?
Because Resolution has photo-matched many of the highest selling jerseys in Heritage's history, cllct reached out to the company to asked whether it had been asked to authenticate the jersey.
Ivy believes enough evidence has been presented to confirm the jersey was definitively worn by Ruth for the "Called Shot," and any opinion otherwise could be nefarious.
He told cllct others could be trying to "potentially damage the auction performance of this extensively authenticated and matched historic jersey -- perhaps in an effort to cool interest or bidding confidence in order to secure the piece at a more modest number."
Details of the match
So, let's get to the specifics of the photo-match in question.
Matching modern day jerseys to high-resolution photos is much easier, given the current technology. Matching to photos taken in 1932 presents a much more difficult challenge.
But Barry Meisel, co-founder of well-respected photo-matching service MeiGray, said he was "happily surprised" when the company did the Ruth research, discovering there was enough clarity to make a ruling.
A picture from the Chicago Sunday Times, shown in the paper the day after the home run, featured Ruth in the dugout before Game 3, and offers a good view of the front of his uniform from Oct. 1, 1932.
The match is admittedly a bit more challenging here because the Yankees don't have pinstripes on their road jerseys, making things harder to align. But the team at MeiGray says it's clear the alignment of the "Y" in York, in respect to where it is between the buttons, is the same alignment in the picture as it is on the consigned jersey.
MeiGray's director of vintage Stu Oxenhorn told cllct the company looked at other jerseys Ruth wore that season and found that the positioning of the "Y" alone did not match.
Panarisi, now with PSA and the former owner of End-to-End, told cllct he agrees with MeiGray's call on the "Y."
Panarisi said, even though he provided letters for two companies, he flushed his memory of the first in order to make the call for PSA. But he did find the same things, which included additional matches on the New York lettering, including a "notch in the N," "a tilt on the middle peak of the W" and a "bend on the bottom portion of the E."
MeiGray's authenticators, in their letter noted the same distinctions.
While PSA executives said they found the photo-matches on their own, Resolution noted the owner of the jersey presented and pushed for these characteristics when it was submitted to the company. Resolution determined these details were not definitively identical in the images of Ruth.
Panarisi also calls attention to what seems to be the exact placement of a circular stain, potentially tobacco juice, below the "E" on both the picture and the jersey. Other stain analysis done by End-to-End has been "reduced or eliminated," Heritage cautions in its auction description, as a result of "subsequent professional cleaning."
Officials at Resolution point out there are many Yankees jerseys worn by different players from that season that have the same alignment between the "Y," buttons, and seam, making that alignment not definitively unique. Resolution also says the clarity of the photo makes it impossible to conclude any of the stains are definitively identical.
"We want to be clear that we don’t disagree this is a highly impressive jersey," Resolution's Robinson said. "And we understand and appreciate the positions of the auction house and consignor in wanting to market the jersey as best they can. They were able to get these other companies to call it a photo-match. That is the part that is so disheartening to us."
All photo-matchers do not take into account the stitching inside that say "Ruth, G.H" or the No. 3 on the back as part of their analysis.
With 32 days remaining in the auction, the "Called Shot" jersey is at $13.2 million, including buyer's premium.
Whether it will end up as the all-time record for a piece of sports memorabilia will be determined when the auction reserve is revealed Aug. 25.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct.com and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.