1916 Herpolsheimer Co. Babe Ruth Rookie #151 PSA NM 7....

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The finest of five PSA examples!

1916 Herpolsheimer Co. Babe Ruth Rookie #151 PSA NM 7. Though this Platinum Night auction provides a rather substantial array of variants of trading cards from the earliest years of Babe Ruth's service to Major League Baseball, it's important to emphasize just how rare all of them are, and this model might just be the rarest of them all. Like its multi-backed contemporaries, a young George Herman "Babe" Ruth commands the obverse in his Boston Red Sox pitching pose, but this variant of the M101-4 set (originally from Sporting News) carries advertising for Herpolsheimer's Boy's Fashion Shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan on verso, a staggeringly rare back compared to the standard blank or Sporting News version.

Nothing close to a full set of this esoteric regional issue has ever been compiled as many of the 200 subjects are absent from the population of the hobby's leading card grading service. In fact, the full census of trading cards from the Herpolsheimer set housed in a PSA slab at the time of this writing is 152. Just five of those picture Babe Ruth.

Presented is the finest of that quintet by a significant measure, outpacing its closest rival by two points, while the other three range between Fair 1.5 and Good 2. This is unquestionably one of the cleanest Ruth rookies we've ever encountered, and we suspect that the rating might have climbed even higher if not for a slight westerly shift in centering. The state of preservation is truly miraculous when we remember that the card's 110th birthday is next year. Graded PSA NM 7.

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