CARDBOARDFILE
13 June 1948, a stand-in photographer, and a card that went on sale after its subject was buried.
01 sep 2026
The regular sports photographer at the New York Herald Tribune called in sick on 13 June 1948, so the paper sent Nat Fein instead.
Fein did not shoot sport. He had joined the Tribune as a copyboy in 1932, bought himself a Speed Graphic three years later, and made his name on human-interest pictures - the sort that need no caption. He took more than fifty thousand photographs across thirty-three years at that paper and photographed Einstein, Kennedy and the Queen Mother. On this particular Sunday he was covering a ceremony because somebody else was ill.
New Yorkers had woken to low grey cloud and rain coming in spurts, unusually cold for June. Yankee Stadium was twenty-five years old that year and the club was marking it by retiring Babe Ruth's number 3 - the second number the Yankees had ever retired, after Lou Gehrig's 4 in 1939. Forty-nine thousand six hundred and forty-one people came.
Ruth was fifty-three and had been fighting throat cancer for two years. He wore a heavy wool overcoat in June. In the dressing room beforehand he sat by his old locker, still marked with the 3, and took out his belt to show Fein how much weight he had lost.
Walking out to the plate he needed something to lean on, and the bat he used was borrowed from Bob Feller, who was pitching for Cleveland against the Yankees that afternoon.
Every photographer at the ground was in front of him. That is where you stand: the man is being honoured, you shoot the man's face. Fein walked round behind instead.
What he got was Ruth from the back - shoulders down, legs thin under the coat, the 3 across his shoulders, a stadium full of people looking at him and the man himself entirely alone in the middle of it.
"You didn't need to see the Babe's face to recognise him," Fein said later. "You'd recognise his great hulk and spindly legs anyplace."
It ran on the front page of the Herald Tribune the next morning under the title Babe Ruth Bows Out, and in 1949 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography. It was the first sports photograph ever to win one.
Two things about that are worth knowing.
An Associated Press photographer got a nearly identical picture that day. The AP did not enter it, so the prize went to the man who was standing there because a colleague was unwell.
And Fein did not rate the shot. "I didn't think it was a great shot," he said of it afterwards. He sent a print to Ruth and asked him to sign it. Ruth never replied.
Nine weeks later, on 16 August 1948, Babe Ruth died. He lay in state in the rotunda at Yankee Stadium for two days and tens of thousands queued past.
The Leaf set was in production across those months.
It carries a 1948 copyright, but the evidence points to release in early 1949, which means the card almost certainly reached shops after its subject was dead. Leaf was printing colour cards of a man who had last played in 1935 and had died while the presses ran.
He is card number 3.
The set is skip-numbered from 1 to 168 with sixty-nine numbers never used, so the company had latitude and knew what it was doing with the numbering. Whether somebody at Leaf chose 3 for the number on his back is not recorded anywhere we have found. It would be a good story. It might just be where he landed.
What the card looks like now is the other half of it. PSA has graded 1,431 copies and none is a PSA 10. Five are PSA 9. Six hundred and nine copies - forty-three per cent of everything submitted - are a PSA 1 or a PSA 2, and seventy-two more came back Authentic with no numeric grade at all. Beckett, SGC and CGC have graded another 820 between them and none of them has awarded a 10 either.
That is the 1948 Leaf printing rather than the card. Leaf laid colour over black and white photographs on presses that could not hold registration, so the images wander and the centring drifts, and a copy can be untouched since 1949 and still not grade above a 4.
The photograph hangs in the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. The card turns up at auction in a 2 more often than anything else.
Full population and every recorded sale are on the card page for the 1948-49 Leaf Babe Ruth #3, and the set that produced it is at 1948-49 Leaf.