Signed 1933 Goudey Babe Ruth #181 PSA Authentic, Auto 7....

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Only seven signed examples known!

Signed 1933 Goudey Babe Ruth #181 PSA Authentic, Auto 7. The Babe entered the 1933 season fresh on the heels of his final World Championship season, one best remembered for his apocryphal "Called Shot" posted in a four-game Series sweep of the Chicago Cubs. So while his prodigious slugging skills may have been on the decline as this first great bubble gum issue tempted sweet-toothed youngsters at the local five-and-dime, the Bambino still held the firmest grasp upon the hearts and minds of the baseball public. That truth unquestionably holds true to this day, and while Ruth's signature is among the most common of any athlete to have supplied the entirety of his career to the pre-war era, it still falls well short of the unending demand.

For those intrepid collectors with a focus upon signed trading cards, the pre-war pickings are extraordinarily thin, with this being one of the very finest we've encountered from the great Bambino. This is the "unique" example of the four Ruth entries in the 1933 Goudey set, the other three utilizing the same image with different backgrounds and/or cropping. The experts at PSA/DNA assign the signature a rating of 7/10, though we'd argue that this grade is a bit on the conservative side. We remind bidders that a PSA/DNA Auto 8 example drew a winning bid of $436,600 in an October 2020 auction.

The card exhibits the edge wear and corner rounding typical of Depression-era cardboard, with a small patch of color loss along right border, but the overall aesthetics are not significantly undermined by these faults. Our catalog photography should serve as clear evidence of this contention. Encapsulated by PSA/DNA, Auto 7.

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