1948-49 Leaf Babe Ruth #3

the card

notes

On 13 June 1948, Babe Ruth walked onto the field at Yankee Stadium for the last time. It was the ballpark's twenty-fifth anniversary and the Yankees were retiring his number 3, the second number the club had ever retired after Lou Gehrig's 4 in 1939. He was 53 and had been fighting cancer for two years. He used a bat as a cane to cross the grass in front of 49,641 people.

Nat Fein of the Herald Tribune broke away from the pack of photographers shooting Ruth head on and took him from behind instead, shoulders sagging, the number 3 across his back. The picture ran on the front page the next morning under the title "Babe Ruth Bows Out" and won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.

He died nine weeks later, on 16 August 1948, and lay in state in the rotunda at Yankee Stadium for two days while tens of thousands queued past.

This set was in production across those months. It carries a 1948 copyright and the evidence points to release in early 1949, which means the card almost certainly reached shops after he was dead. He is card number 3 in it. Whether Leaf chose that number for the number on his back is not recorded anywhere, and the set is skip-numbered from 1 to 168 with sixty-nine numbers unused, so the company clearly had latitude.

Ruth had last played in 1935, thirteen years before the set appeared. He finished with 714 home runs and a .342 average, and in 1936 he was one of the first five men elected to the Hall of Fame.

The population is the poorest of any headline card in this set. Of 1,431 copies PSA has graded, none is a PSA 10 and five are PSA 9. Beckett, SGC and CGC have graded 185, 620 and 15 copies of it between them, and none of them has awarded a 10 either. PSA 1 and PSA 2 together account for 609 copies, which is 43 per cent of everything submitted. Seventy two more came back Authentic with no numeric grade at all.

That is the set doing what the set does. Leaf laid colour over black and white photographs on presses that could not hold registration, so images wander, colours misalign and centring drifts, and a card can be untouched since 1949 and still not grade above a 4. The other three famous cards here tell the same story: DiMaggio at 1 has one PSA 9 in 1,276 copies, Ted Williams at 76 has seven in 1,287, Jackie Robinson at 79 has seven in 1,619. None of the four has ever produced a 10.

population

PSA

graded elsewhere

recorded 29 aug 2026. figures are a snapshot on that date, not a live count.

recorded sales

dated past results, not an estimate of what a copy is worth today. figures published by an auction house normally include the buyer's premium, so they are more than the seller received.

where to buy one

This is a low-grade card and pricing it any other way will only frustrate you. Forty-three per cent of the graded population is a PSA 1 or 2, and those copies are the market. A PSA 3 or 4 is an ordinary example. A PSA 5 is a good one. A PSA 7 is a genuinely scarce card, and above that you are looking at forty-one PSA 8s and five PSA 9s in the world.

Reprints exist and circulate cheaply, which is the single biggest trap on this card. A 1948 Leaf Ruth reprint sells for a few dollars and looks broadly right in a photograph. Buy this one graded, and verify the certificate number with the grading company before paying.

Seventy-two copies are graded Authentic. On a card this valuable that usually means genuine but altered - trimmed, recoloured or worked on - so an Authentic holder is information rather than a discount.

Check what you are actually buying against the Leaf Premium photographs of Ruth, which are a separate issue from this set and are sometimes listed alongside it.

And check the size before buying pages. These are 2 and 3/8 by 2 and 7/8 inches and will not sit in a standard modern sleeve.

what to check before you buy

Verify the certificate number directly with PSA. Reprints of this card are common and cheap, and a slab photograph is not proof of anything on its own.

Read the label for a qualifier. Fifty-seven copies carry one, and on a card where most of the population sits at 1 and 2, a qualifier at 4 or 5 matters.

Do not read poor colour registration as damage or as a fake. Misaligned colour, a halo around the figure and a slightly doubled image are original to how this set was printed. They cap the grade. They are not evidence that anything happened to the card.

Check centring on both sides.

Check the back. Wrong backs, blank backs and overprinted backs are documented across this set and PSA tracks wrong backs as separate entries. Card 3 is not among the numbers where PSA lists one, so a wrong back here is something to ask about rather than assume.

sources