It’s bidder up for the Babe
A trove of Babe Ruth’s personal items, including his hand-stitched hunting gloves and an autographed photo of Lou Gehrig, will go up for auction next year, his family announced Tuesday.
Linda Ruth Tosetti, the granddaughter of the legendary Bronx Bomber, has been taking care of the collection since she was a 10-year-old responsible for “dusting the baseballs” she said.
“We are downsizing and there is no place anyone can house what we have,” Tosetti, 63, whose mom was Dorothy Ruth Pirone, Ruth’s only biological child, told The Post. “Now it’s time to let it go and share it with the fans.”
The list of items to be auctioned on June 15 at Yankee Stadium hasn’t been finalized, but it will include a pair of the Sultan of Swat’s game-worn, size-11 cleats, his “Better year than the President” 1930-31 contract with the New York Yankees and a baseball Ty Cobb autographed for him.
Also up for sale by the Hunt Auctions house will be an engraved urn gifted to the Bambino during a 1934 visit to Japan. He tried to destroy it in a rage after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“When they bombed Pearll HHarborb it broke my grandfather’s heart that these people who loved him so much would do this to his country,” Tosetti said at a press conference at The Stadium Tuesday. “You’ll see a toe mark where he kicked it.”
It’s unclear how much the items are worth but Ruth is a big seller in the sports-memorabilia world. A Yankee jersey he wore in 1920 sold for a record $4.4 million in 2012.
He retired in 1935 with 714 home runs, a record that stood for nearly 40 years.
Tosetti has kept the collection secret because she feared someone would break into her Connecticut home to steal it. It’s also why she doesn’t want the items in a museum, where they could fall prey to robbers, since “Babe is always the first to be stolen.”
Tosetti hopes that by auctioning them off, the pieces will be cared for.
“It’s taken me two years to make this decision and I feel like sometimes I am selling my soul,” she confided, but added, “Why do we need all of these signatures of these baseball players when I have the DNA of the greatest one that’s out there?”