1932 Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig Dual-Signed Wooden Orange with Original Snapshots....

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1932 Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig Dual-Signed Wooden Orange with Original Snapshots. Unquestionably one of the most unique artifacts deriving from the fruitful slugging partnership that established the Bronx as the center of the baseball world, this orange sphere is meant to be a figural approximation of the citrus crop that surrounded the Yankees' spring training home of St. Petersburg, Florida. Along with this unique relic comes a removed scrapbook page deriving from the same source and holding one-of-a-kind snapshots of the Babe and the Iron Horse preparing for the 1932 World Championship season in the Sunshine State. A third snapshot (each 2.75x4.5") is a panoramic view of the practice field, with Ruth at the plate and Gehrig assuming his first base duties.

A letter of provenance from our consignor explains,

"As a college graduation gift to my father, his grandmother took dad to Florida for an extended vacation. While there, they had an opportunity to attend a Yankees baseball practice game on March 4, 1932. At the time there was an orange growers festival going on. We aren't sure if there were wooden orange decorations available or the fans were given wooden oranges as souvenirs. Either way, dad had an orange. When the game was over and my father was leaving, he had the good fortune of walking past Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in the stadium parking lot. Dad asked if he could take a photo of each and get their signatures. They agreed. He took the photos but the only thing dad had to get signatures on was this wooden orange. So with his pocket knife he scraped off the orange collar and got their signatures using a pencil."

The signatures appear exactly as they did on the warm spring day they were applied, Ruth's a solid 8/10 and Gehrig's perhaps a shade lighter at 7/10, with any deficiency in boldness due only to the difficulty of the medium. Unlike just about every baseball in the hobby, this wonderful oddity finds the pair sharing the same hemisphere of the orb, allowing for perfect joint display. A wonderful memento of a special time in New York Yankees history. Full LOA from PSA/DNA. Full LOA from James Spence Authentication.

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