HEAD & (NO) SHOULDERS: Collector scores rare find with 1920s Babe Ruth ‘Shoulderless’ card, set

As expected, the Goldin Winter Vintage Elite Auction that concluded on Feb. 15 included a strong cross-section of sports cards and memorabilia. But the main item collector Sam Dodero kept tracking throughout the event was a rare 1920s W-UNC “Shoulderless” Babe Ruth strip card.

Graded SGC 2 GOOD, it sold for $48,000 ($58,560 with the Buyer’s Premium) and that result meshed for Dodero like a bat’s well-placed sweet spot on an incoming fastball that sparked a majestic home run.

Flashback to the summer of 2024 and Dodero, a veteran sports card collector, sat in the lounge of a nearby Chicago-area auto dealership. As the minutes ticked by the collector patiently passed some time on his phone looking for his main interest within the hobby—rare vintage sports cards.

“I like to spend some time hunting, because if you don’t do that you’re never going to find anything,” Dodero said. “Somebody had posted these cards on Facebook and I knew immediately I had never seen them before—and I’ve been doing this for 41 years. The guy said he was interested in selling them. And I think I got a little lucky because nobody was looking for anything on Facebook because everybody was at The National, and it was a small Facebook post anyway and I don’t think too many people saw it.”

The cards included eight strip cards from the 1920s, six depicting actors and two of ultra-rare Babe Ruth cards from an offering known as the “Shoulderless” set, named as such due to the unusual cropping of the baseball player’s photos.

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Both parties stayed in touch, each researched the cards more, and soon after The National Dodero and his wife drove about 90 minutes to Northern Indiana and met the seller at a town hall.

“The guy was all excited to sell the cards to me and he said you’re going to love these cards,” he said.

Within a couple of days after completing the transaction Dodero posted info about his “find” on one of the Net54baseball.com forums. Soon after the posting, he was “blitzed by auction houses and private collectors.” Due to the overwhelming response the collector “realized how much demand” the cards actually spawned.

“One private collector told me, this is a ‘find’ of a lifetime, so you better quit now,” Dodero said. “Another said he was a big Babe Ruth collector and has been looking for one Ruth card for years—and that was the card.”

ORIGIN STORY

Decades ago, many strip cards made it into collector’s hands as a bonus for buying candy or other sweet treats at regional retail establishments such as a general store, a five-and-dime or pharmacy. The retail owners or workers cut or tore the cards from a strip or poster—which often explains their quite uneven measurements.

So how did the seller in this 21st century tale come across these rare 1920s strip cards?

Dodero said he could only go by what the guy told him, but the explanation unfolded in simple fashion.

“The seller told me his family started a store in 1903 and apparently they carried sports cards over many years and they were eventually passed down to him,” he said.

The collector added that the seller also had tobacco cards to sell as well, including a Ty Cobb, but that there were so many of those cards in the hobby that Dodero was not interested in them.

At first Dodero just looked to keep the eight cards together in his collection, but after a couple months of thinking about the situation and also buying a rare 1911-16 T216 People’s Tobacco Mino Cigarettes PSA 1 card of Hall of Famer Honus Wagner (for $51,250), the collector decided to get the Ruth cards graded via SGC. They were the first Ruth cards from this issue to ever get professionally encapsulated. He sold one (the SGC 2) to help pay for the Wagner card.

Courtesy of Sam Dodero

“I accomplished my goal,” he said, “and I am very happy about it.”

Dodero’s additional Ruth card from the set, the more off-centered of the duo, earned a grade of SGC 1 Poor.

“I wasn’t going to auction off any of the Ruth cards, but I am a collector, not an investor and it was about getting something else I like [the T216 Wagner] and I still have the other [“Shoulderless”] Ruth.”

MORE SPECS

The “Shoulderless” blank-backed cards measure approximately 1½-by-2 5/8 inches and feature sepia-toned images against a blank white background. Of the eleven known baseball players in the issue, most are Hall of Famers. Cooperstown inductees from the offering accompanying Ruth include Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and Tris Speaker.

In a Fall 2013 REA auction a “Shoulderless” Cobb (SGC 10/Poor 1) sold for $2,252 and a Speaker (SGC 20/Fair 1.5) from the same offering brought $711. Those two cards and the recently graded Ruth cards from the set make up many of the only graded samples from the issue. As to raw samples of these cards in private collections, it appears those numbers remain unknown but are likely on the extreme low end, too.

The actor cards in the Dodero “find” include: three of comedian James Aubrey (who appeared in some Laurel & Hardy films); two of Hoot Gibson (a cowboy movie star); and one of Joseph Schildkraut (who won a 1937 Best Supporting Actor Oscar). It is worth noting that the actor card images do not display the odd cropping of the shoulders like the baseball players and the Hoot Gibson card features the actor in a more conventional image, in what looks like street clothes, and from about mid-thigh up.

When did the “Shoulderless” set enter the hobby? The answer to that question makes many shrug their shoulders with modest uncertainty.

At first glance some collectors saw the Ruth card, in which he dons his Red Sox cap and flannels, and the photo caption reading “Yankees” and presumed that the card was from 1920, the first year Ruth played for New York after leaving Boston. A Ruth Yankees rookie—that would be a boost.

Although a possibility, that 1920 designation for the set is unlikely. Unless the cards trickled into distribution a few a year (doubtful), the cards have to be at least from 1923 because Hall of Fame pitcher Herb Pennock, listed as a Yankee in the “Shoulderless” offering, did not begin his time with the Bronx Bombers until 1923.

Couple that with the fact that Hall of Fame infielder Walter “Rabbit” Maranville is listed in the set with the Pirates, who he played with from 1921-24. That makes the 1923-1925 time frame for the set’s debut seem even more reasonable. This cloudiness contributes a great deal to these cards in SGC slabs being described more broadly as stemming from the “1920s.”

Whatever year these cards came from, Dodero plans to keep his SGC 1 “Shoulderless” Ruth strip card standing shoulder to shoulder in his collection of rare vintage cards.