Usually you want your baseball cards to have a little story that can be told about their acquisition. It transforms a niche, personal interest into something that someone else will care about. “This is the card that Willie Mays stopped and signed for my dad,” you might say to an otherwise uninterested observer, transforming it from a bit of cardboard into something relatable.
Maybe you earned that card in a weirdly impressive way. I got this Zach Greinke rookie as the prize for beating a fat guy in a hot dog eating contest in Kansas City. If you tell the story right, your audience will go home and brag to their friends about how they know a guy with a great Zach Greinke card and a bellyache.
Some baseball card provenance is terrifying. Oh this Yankees signed baseball? Yeah, I got this after me and my friends lost my dad’s Babe Ruth autographed ball over a fence and we got chased by a 15-foot-tall man eating dog. Someone should make a movie about that.
This summer I bought a Babe Ruth card, and I was perfectly content with its origin story being me not going to a card show and liquidating a handful of lesser cards to fund the purchase. It was strait forward and boring, as it should be. There are some things, like the processing of your tax return or the delivery of the mail, that you want to be uneventful. Anything exciting in either of those two activities promises heart palpitations.
A few days ago I wrote a bit about what led me to acquire the only Babe Ruth card I have ever held in my hands, but I left out the mechanics of its actual arrival. After agreeing to the purchase, I got a tracking number and did the thing I always do and pretend I don’t: I watched it. On delivery day, I saw the “out for delivery” status on my phone and took up a post on my front steps with a book I had no intention of actually reading. I was like a runner taking a lead off first. I was poised to move but not yet going anywhere, just paying very close attention to the starting and stopping sounds of an approaching truck.
The boxy, red white and blue mail truck rolled up and reached the mailbox at the same time I did (good thing I took that lead). The carrier handed me two flyers, one a window-replacement circular and the other for a mattress sale, and drove on. No Ruth. I reminded myself the tracking apps are often off by a day, that “arriving today” has the same reliability as a fortune cookie, and went back to not “reading” my book.
A few minutes later, my phone lit up: Package Delivered. Left with person at residence.
There was no person. There was only me, and I had not received a package. Somewhere in my neighborhood, a stranger was holding a Babe Ruth card and did not know it.
I want to tell you that I coolly weighed my options. I did not weigh my options. I went from sitting to a full sprint in the time it takes to read this sentence, guessing (correctly, it turned out) that the truck was working the block in right turns, circling the neighborhood like a runner rounding bases.
This brings me, because I cannot help myself, to the only time Babe Ruth’s own base-running made history. It was Game 7 of the 1926 World Series, bottom of the ninth, with the Yankees down a run to the St. Louis Cardinals. Ruth drew a two-out walk from Grover Cleveland Alexander, the same Alexander thrown a complete game two days earlier and was pulled out of the bullpen this day to face Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded. Alexander had extinguished that fire by striking out Lazzeri and was left in this one run game for the final 2 innings on two days’ rest. With Bob Meusel at the plate as the potential wining run, Ruth broke for second unannounced. Catcher Bob O’Farrell fired a strike to Rogers Hornsby covering the bag. Ruth was out. Series over. Nobody has ended a World Series on a caught stealing since, and the Bambino himself never explained the decision to anyone’s satisfaction.
I bring this up because Babe Ruth, in his entire career, never successfully covered two blocks at a dead sprint to save anything. That job, this particular afternoon, fell to me as I covered two blocks before gaining the mail carrier’s attention.
I caught the truck with my arms waving. The carrier stopped and looked at me, a stranger, sweating, holding junk mail, and apparently upset. I could see him doing the calculation of which of his de-escalation tactics to employ as I went to show him the delivery notification. Confusion. I explained the situation. More confusion. Then I said the words “Babe Ruth baseball card” out loud, on a public street, and watched something click behind his eyes.
“Babe Ruth!!! The Bambino?” he said, with the exact cadence of a kid in The Sandlot movie. “I gotta get that box back.”
He knew precisely where he’d left it. He U-turned the truck mid-block, an actual U-turn, in a mail truck, for a stranger’s cardboard and I did the only thing left to do, which was run again, past my own house, meeting him coming the other direction with a small brown box on the dashboard.
We opened it right there on the sidewalk, the two of us, a Postal Service employee and a man in sneakers, staring down at a 90-year-old Bambino that looked perturbed at all the excitement, trading nicknames back and forth like a call-and-response. The Colossus of Clout! The King of Crash! The Sultan of Swat! -until we ran out and just started laughing instead.
My ’35 Goudey Ruth is, technically, a shared card. He is just one of four small portraits jammed onto a single “4-in-1” front, sharing cardboard real estate with Marty McManus, Ed Brandt, and an odd image of Hall of Famer Rabbit Maranville looking more like a locomotive engineer than an infielder. Even in my collection, it turns out, the Babe needed a supporting cast. Fair enough. So did I, this time: One very patient mailman and a set of lungs I was pleased to see still worked like that.
Ruth ended up as the home run king and the answer to a trivia question about the worst-timed steal attempt in World Series history. I have decided, for the record, that I did what he couldn’t. The box score of my afternoon reads two blocks right, three blocks left, no outs recorded, and now, safe at home.
