2016 Leaf Babe Ruth Bat card
 

If they just took the bat chip out this would be a pretty cool Babe Ruth card.
Could this get newer collectors interested in collecting vintage? It is a great picture...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/2016-Leaf-BA...0AAOSwImRYfEzq

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I personally think we're going to see a resurgence in baseball card collecting in the next couple of years. They said that baseball's viewership has started to grow and football's is shrinking which is good news for the baseball collecting world. Previously baseball was shrinking and football was expanding so we should be in the early stages of some good momentum.

I don't know if the increase in collecting will transfer into vintage but at the worst I think we should see the hobby start to grow over the next couple of years...especially if the economy starts to grow at a reasonable rate.

I know when I started to get into cards a little when I was younger, I thought it was the coolest thing to pull a Ruth or Mantle card. Even if it was a common of them, it was still pretty exciting

I don't have a clue what people will be collecting in 20 years, but I wonder if the collecting hobbies in general will emerge less frequently among people who have grown up acquiring their books, music, and movies electronically. Some might say that should create a void that could be filled by collecting tangible things, but I suspect that prediction is characteristic of people who have shelves (or closets) full of old books, records, casettes, CDs, videotapes, DVDs...

I am looking at some of these 1-1 Leaf Ruth bat cards. Some are really nice photos.

My 20 yrs old daughter, and her friends, are into a "retro-thing" nowadays. Two Christmas's ago she wanted a record (vinyl) player for Christmas. She likes some retro clothes too. So who knows, with all of the virtual this and virtual that, and online social blah, blah, blah maybe the younger generation will end up yearning for things which are tactile and which most of us grew up with.

I heard about that new(er) fad, Leon. My sister in college said records and vinyls are all the rage now. A friend on her floor even has a record player.

Nice picture of Ruth. Pretty svelte looking for him. People erroneously believe Ruth a huge fat guy his whole career. Not true. His weight fluctuated a good deal. It's also humorous that I'm guessing there are more than a few dozen guys in baseball today bigger than Ruth ever was. Yes, Bartolo Colon and David Ortiz, I'm talking to you.

deff a cool pic of ruth but they messed it up with all that new design crap, lol

my sons 7 and i started him on collecting by giving him some 1986-90's cards - now hes obsessed. He has told us he dosnt want a superhero room anymore wants a sports room and wants to display his "rare cards" and set up his desk with some cards. lol


ALSO, getting back to that card - the back says - "auth piece of bat used during his years with the yankees" ... hmmm - im from NYC so id ask, used by who? whos bat is it? was it used by a red sock in 1925? or a yankee in 1926? or was it used by ruth himself?

If i made these cards and it was a ruth bat , id be sure to put on the back - "This is from a bat babe ruth used!"

I sort of think that the public resurgence of interest in MLB at the expense of NFL just might have been the Cubbies historic thrilling WS victory and the media exposure attached to it.

Less than $1 when you take out the shard.
http://img.comc.com/i/Baseball/2016/...&size=original
2016 Leaf Babe Ruth Collection - [Base] #15 - Babe Ruth
Courtesy of COMC.com

http://www.comc.com/Cards/Baseball/2...ase,sc,ot,i100

I enjoy the Topps Heritage sets they put out now. It's always a throw back style with modern players. The Harper 63 Topps style card is awesome. When the two mix together the right way you get really nice cards.

These are from what's actually a pretty nice set. I got mine in a blaster type box from Target. Obviously the bat cards were the hook, and at the original price of $30 I wasn't all that interested. But at the closeout price of maybe 12 or 15 I figured why not? I didn't get a bat card, but I did get a nice card set and some "inserts" 100 cards, if I remember it right, all of Ruth.

I'm thinking that might eventually get a few people interested in prewar in general, although most won't get past the lottery ticket aspect of it.

Steve B

With the exception of super high end products with MLB authentication stickers, that's pretty much the way they do all these "relic" cards today. In the early days of such cards (late 90's), they were actually reasonably specific about the item in the description on back. But either the lawyers told them to be more vague, or the companies themselves are less confident in the relics authenticity, as here's a more standard disclaimer you'll find in 2017 cards:

"THE RELIC CONTAINED ON THIS CARD IS NOT FROM ANY SPECIFIC GAME, EVENT, OR SEASON"

Yikes! Inspires a lot of confidence.

What really blows my mind is the people that will spend more on a relic card of a modern player (with no certifiable game use at all) than it probably would have cost them to buy an actual game-used jersey.


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Matching a game used bat with a commemorative Ruth photo is marketing genius .... If it brings in more collectors then so be it!! Hopefully they don't spend a lot on this stuff though. :o

If they destroyed a game used bat for this I would be very sad. This is just a card with value. A bat is a tangible piece of history that should be preserved, this is crap.

I do too. My only gripe is that the first set, with the current players in the '52 design, came out in 2001 - so the current set will be using the design of 49 years ago. If only they had waited a year it would have been an even 50 years, and Topps could have been able to market them as "today's players in the classic designs of 50 years ago."

Say it ain't so.....
 

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