Last I looked, the bid is $15 million for the baseball jersey that New York Yankee Babe Ruth wore when he supposedly “called his shot” in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series.

Ruth never forecast that home run, and I’ll get to that in a minute, after the story about the Babe Ruth home run ball a colleague placed on my desk one day.

“John wanted you to have this,” Wendy said that bright morning, handing me a tired baseball. “He says it’s a home run ball that Babe Ruth hit.”

John is a bit of an academic, a bit of a soccer coach and a bit of a connoisseur -— with a wry sense of humor.

That baseball was not tired enough to have been whacked by Babe Ruth. The ball looked like what it was: Forgotten and weathered, until their dog sniffed it out of tall grass during a walk with John the night before. It was signed, but not with a clichéd forged Babe signature. John had signed his name.

I might still be working if every morning could start off with that level of absurdity.

And the ball kept giving. People tend to ask about items displayed near your desk.

“Wendy’s husband gave it to me,” I’d say. “He says it’s a Babe Ruth home run ball.”

“Really? It’s signed?”

“Yes. By Wendy’s husband.”

No one ever synthesized that anachronism with more than a vacant look.

I still have that mottled baseball. I have a decades old, black-and-white head shot of Ethel Merman that a colleague photocopied, on which was forged the personal greeting, “To Jim, such a lovely boy, Ethel.”

Just “Ethel,” as if we had both started our illustrious careers working the same clubs in Manhattan. And she owned a Xerox machine.

I also have a page torn from a yellow legal pad and signed by pro wrestler Chief Wahoo McDaniel.

I had never heard of Wahoo before interviewing him for my college newspaper. I had no interest in pro wrestling. Importantly, I had not asked for his autograph.

Memorabilia should have a story and be worthless to everyone but you. You hang a framed Babe Ruth jersey on the wall? You fret about cat burglars. I don’t want to own the laundry that Babe Ruth wore when he didn’t call his shot.

Chicago broadcaster Hal Totten interviewed Ruth in the spring of 1933. Totten was behind the microphone for the ’32 World Series, a rough affair in the years when a ballpark was a seedy place.

“Hell, no, I didn’t point,” Ruth told Totten. “Only a damned fool would do a thing like that.”

Ruth would soon recognize the value of embracing the myth. He did not do so at first.

“You know, there was a lot of pretty rough ribbing going on, on both benches,” he said. “When I swung and missed the first one, those Cubs really gave me a blast. So I grinned at ’em and held out one finger and told ’em it’d take only one to hit it.

“Then there was that second strike, and they let me have it again. So I held up that finger again and I said I still have one left.

“Naw, keed, you know damn well I wasn’t pointin’ anywhere. I never really knew anybody who could tell you ahead of time where he was going to hit a baseball. When I get to be that kind of fool, they’ll put me in the booby hatch.”

Pitchers were truculent in Ruth’s era. Cubs’ pitcher Charlie Root was one of the harder throwers in baseball when he gave up that home run.

“If he’d made a gesture like that,” Root said in 1967, “well, anyone who knows me knows that Babe would have wound up on his posterior.’

Neither the New York Times nor The Sporting News mentioned a called shot in game reports. Twenty years later, The Sporting News refused to state that the story was true. Instead, it hedged.

“It adds lustre (SIC) to a great game and gilds one of the most remarkable careers in sports history.”

Sportswriting greats Grantland Rice and Damon Runyan didn’t gild the game. There’s no mention of Ruth’s theatrics in their reports. The son of sportswriter Ring Lardner expanded on that.

John Lardner said in 1956 that all writers at the game whom he later spoke with denied that Ruth called his shot. Those who had seen Ruth play often said the Big Fella often held up a finger with two strikes, indicating he had one more.

We love to take refuge in myths. The myth attached to that size 46 jersey won’t die.

No one is happier about it than the Heritage Auction House.

Babe’s jersey is expected to go for $30 million.