Babe Ruth's impact on the game of baseball and on the salaries of the men who played alongside him can hardly be overstated. Like only a handful of modern contemporaries who might aspire to a similar role - Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky come to mind - Babe Ruth in his prime seemed bigger - or at least as big - as the sport he played. He quickly rewrote the record books after stepping aside from a promising pitching career, hitting home runs at a pace completely unimaginable by the game's purists at the time.

While the powers-that-be would ultimately decide that Ruth was too great of a hitter to be confined to mound duties every fourth day, the youngster socked 29 home runs in his final year with the Red Sox while still a member of the pitching staff. Indeed, he led the American League in homers in both 1918 and 1919 with totals of 11 and 29, respectively. That latter figure seemed breathtaking at the time, but as we know, the best was yet to come. Ruth had out-homered 10 teams in Major League Baseball that year.

Sold to the Red Sox rival Yankees in 1920, he hit 54 home runs, becoming the first player to pass milestones of 30, 40 and 50 seasons all in one year. With that he out-homered every other team in the American League and all but one team in the National League. He also hit more home runs than 11 pairs of teams that year! For example, that year the Red Sox hit 22 homers while the Tigers slugged 30 circuit clouts, drawing their combined total two shy of the Bambino’s 54. In all, he out-homered other teams 90 times in his career, a level of dominance way past anything ever imagined in professional sports. A thank-you to the good folks at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is due for crunching those startling numbers.

Babe Ruth hit a mere 34 home runs in 1933, his penultimate year with the Yankees and the year he signed this Last Will and Testament on the day after Christmas. The nine-page document (pages are 13-by-9 inches) is in superlative condition, essentially Ex-Mt or even better, and is affixed to the traditional "Last Will and Testament" cover folder, with the ornate old English script and Ruth's full name and the Dec. 26, 1933 date typed on the cover piece. Ruth's elegant signature appears on the final page, using his full name "George Herman Ruth," a grudging nod to formality that The Bambino would typically reserve for official documents and the like. Three other New York State residents have signed as witnesses below Ruth's signature, adding their residence information. Also included is the traditional heavy cardstock 5-by-10-inch flapped envelope with "Will of George Herman Ruth and the date" typed on the cover. The envelope is in complementary condition, jostled only slightly by a small 3/4-inch tear to the flap.

When the Babe passed away on August 16, 1948 at the age of 53, a national treasure was lost. It is well-documented that the vast majority of Babe’s personal memorabilia was gifted, at Ruth’s consent, to the National Baseball Hall of Fame shortly after his passing. The offered Last Will and Testament is among only a few Ruth mementos ever offered to the public with direct Ruth family provenance. It is accompanied by a LOA from Babe Ruth's grandson Tom Stevens.Additional full LOA from PSA/DNA.