Hit a few home runs lately? Maybe you should pass on cleaning that jersey when you get home from the road trip, on the off chance that it will be worth a ton of dough in, oh, 90 years.
Baseball great Babe Ruth's dirty laundry (and no, not THAT kind of dirty laundry, though you have to figure the high-living Bambino had more than a little of it) from his first Yankee season just was sold at auction for $4.4 million.
Believe it or not, that is a lot even by Ruth's Olympian standards. In fact, it's an auction record for a baseball artifact.
When you read the details of the jersey in the New York Times piece, you understand a bit of why it attracted such interest. It still has Ruth's name written in pink script in the collar, and dirt and (probably) sweat from being worn in a series of road games.
Ruth wore the jersey in 1920, his first season after being traded by the Boston Red Sox (and thus allegedly creating the Curse of the Bambino for the BoSox, who wouldn't win a World Series again until this century).
Ruth would, of course, go on to revolutionize the game, whacking home runs at a record rate and living a colorful life as leader of some of the most dominant teams in baseball history. No word if the just-sold jersey has a pocket big enough to accommodate the wad of cash needed to buy it.
(Image courtesy of SCP Auctions, by way of AP)
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