In the mythography of American sports, certain names carry a weight that exceeds championship titles and statistical records. They represent something harder to quantify — a transformation in the way a sport is played, watched, and understood. When Julien’s Auctions presents Sports Legends: The Pitch to The Court on July 9th, the basketball and baseball offerings speak directly to that legacy, bringing museum-grade artifacts tied to athletes who didn’t just win — they redefined the games entirely.

Basketball

The basketball section of the sale is anchored by two figures whose careers overlapped, intersected, and diverged in ways that gave the NBA its defining narrative of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Together, their artifacts in this sale represent two distinct chapters — one a beginning, the other a middle — of basketball’s ongoing transformation into a global phenomenon.

LeBron James

Game-Worn and Signed Rookie Year Cleveland Cavaliers Jersey

Estimate: $300,000 – $500,000

The most significant basketball lot in the sale — and one of the most significant basketball artifacts to come to auction in recent memory. This game-worn and signed Cleveland Cavaliers jersey from LeBron James’ rookie season captures the precise moment at which the course of basketball history shifted. James arrived in the NBA directly from high school, carrying the full weight of a sports media machine that had declared him the next great one before he’d played a professional minute. He delivered. The rookie jersey is a rare physical record of that beginning — the opening chapter of a career so decorated it eventually prompted a genuine debate about the greatest player the sport has ever produced.

Kobe Bryant

1998 Game-Worn and Signed Adidas Basketball Shoes

Estimate: $10,000 – $20,000

In 1998, Kobe Bryant was already becoming something distinct — a player whose relentless competitiveness and baroque skill set were setting him apart not just from his peers but from the broader tradition of professional basketball. These game-worn and signed Adidas shoes were laced up during the formative years of that legend, before five championships, before two Olympic gold medals, before the career that would eventually be abbreviated and honored in the same moment. The shoes carry the specific weight of a journey still in progress — Bryant at the threshold of everything that was coming.

Michael Jordan

1997–1998 Chicago Bulls Warm-Up Ensemble

Estimate: $3,000 - $5,000

There is a reason the 1997–98 Chicago Bulls season carries its own name. "The Last Dance" was not merely a farewell — it was a defiant, turbulent, and ultimately triumphant final statement from the greatest dynasty in NBA history, playing out in real time against a backdrop of internal fracture, front-office conflict, and the looming certainty that it would all be over by June. Jordan that season was operating at a level that seemed almost adversarial in its excellence: NBA MVP, scoring title, Finals MVP, and a game-winning shot against the Utah Jazz in Game 6 that sealed his sixth championship and closed the chapter with the kind of finality that sport rarely manufactures so cleanly.

This Nike warm-up shirt, worn by Jordan during that season's pre-game rituals, is a direct artifact of those months — not the arena heroics, but the quieter preparation that preceded them, the routine that anchored one of sport's most mythologized runs. Accompanied by Letters of Provenance, it enters the market as a piece of basketball history whose cultural weight only continues to grow.

Tennis

Between the basketball court and the baseball diamond, the sale pauses for a figure whose influence on sport extended well beyond any single discipline — one of the most decorated athletes in the history of professional competition.

Serena Williams

Match-Issued and Signed 2009 Nike Air Max Mirabella Tennis Shoes

Estimate: $600 – $800

The year 2009 stands among the most significant in Serena Williams’ career: she captured the Australian Open and Wimbledon singles titles and reclaimed the World No. 1 ranking, reasserting a dominance that the sport would come to accept as a permanent condition. These Nike Air Max Mirabella shoes, match-issued and signed twice in black marker, are artifacts of that landmark season — physical records of a year that reinforced Williams’ place not merely among the great tennis players, but among the great athletes in the full breadth of sports history.

Baseball

If basketball is defined by the present and the future, baseball carries its mythology in the past — in the records, the seasons, the individual moments that the sport has always treated with a reverence bordering on the sacred. The sale’s baseball offering centers on one of the game’s most storied records and the player who both broke and defined it.

Babe Ruth

Signed Baseball

Estimate: $3,000 – $5,000

There is no more iconic signature in the history of American sport. A baseball hand-signed by Babe Ruth to the sweet spot — the most coveted real estate on any signed ball — arrives here accompanied by a second signature from Yankees shortstop Lyn Lary, a detail that quietly narrows the window of provenance to a single two-year span. Ruth and Lary shared a Yankees roster only during the 1929 and 1930 seasons, which places this ball with unusual precision for a Ruth signed piece. Accompanied by a Letter of Authenticity from PSA, it is among the most accessible entry points in the sale to one of the most consequential careers in the history of professional sports.

1932 Sanella Margarine Trading Card (PSA)

Estimate: $1,000 – $2,000

By 1932, Babe Ruth's fame had crossed the Atlantic thoroughly enough to make him the subject of a German margarine trading card — a detail that speaks to the sheer scale of his cultural reach in an era before television and global media infrastructure. This original Sanella Margarine #83 card captures him at the height of his Yankees dynasty, the same year he allegedly called his shot in the World Series against the Chicago Cubs. The statistical case it represents is staggering even at a century's remove: 714 home runs, a .342 career batting average, seven World Series championships, and a 22-season arc that stretched from the Boston Braves to the Red Sox to the pinstripes that would come to define him. Encapsulated and graded NM-7 by PSA, the card's condition only deepens its significance as both a sports artifact and a piece of American cultural history.

Roger Maris

Photo-Matched 1962 Record Defending Home Run Season Baseball Bat

Estimate: $4,000 – $6,000

When Roger Maris hit his sixty-first home run in 1961, he broke a record that Babe Ruth had held for thirty-four years — and in doing so, triggered a cultural debate that would define his public life for decades. This photo-matched baseball bat from the following 1962 season finds Maris at the most complicated moment of his career: a record-holder navigating the enormous, often hostile pressure of his own achievement. The bat is not merely sports memorabilia; it is a document of one of baseball’s most psychologically fraught legacies, and of the toll that history-making can exact on the individual who makes it.

After Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's single-season home run record, using a bat that was 11 ounces lighter than Ruth's, a sports writer named Leslie Lieber persuaded Maris to test the theory that the heavier bats from the early 20th century would be more difficult to hit home runs with, implying that Roger's lighter bat was the reason he was able to break the record. Maris took exception to that idea and was happy for the opportunity to prove his skills. Lieber and Maris commissioned Hillerich & Bradsby, the makers of Louisville Slugger baseball bats, to produce four different bats based on the same models used by Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Pete Browning, and Frank "Home Run" Baker.

Photo-matching — the process by which a specific object is authenticated against photographic evidence of its use in competition — elevates this bat beyond standard game-used material. It places the object definitively within a documented moment, lending it a verifiability that makes it among the most rigorously authenticated pieces in the sale.

The full Sports Legends: The Pitch To The Court catalog is now available to view. A curated selection of highlights is on view at the Museum of Pop Culture (MOPOP) in Seattle from June 12 through July 5, 2026. The live auction takes place Thursday, July 9, 2026 at 10:00 AM PT in Los Angeles, California. Registration to bid is open online now and in person on the day of the sale.

What unites the basketball, tennis, and baseball artifacts in this sale is a quality that transcends sport: each object holds within it the memory of a specific human attempt at greatness — the rookie finding his footing, the veteran pressing toward perfection, the champion defending what’s been won. Julien’s Auctions has long understood that these artifacts carry more than monetary value. They carry culture.