Sports

Kids May Play Baseball on Same Field as Young Babe Ruth

Plan to restore field will allow kids to stand where Ruth learned baseball.

How would you like to stand at home plate where the young Babe Ruth learned baseball more than a century ago?

According to , that may soon be a reality.

The acquisition and development of the former Cardinal Gibbons school property by St. Agnes Hospital includes plans to recreate the baseball field as it was configured when Ruth played at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys.

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"Preserving the field was important to us," said William Greskovich, the hospital's vice president of operations and capital projects.

"The plan is to recreate home plate of the new field where it was when Babe Ruth went to school there, so children will be able to step up to home plate and say that's where the Babe swung at a ball for the first time," Greskovich said.

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The Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation will establish a youth development park at the location.

George Herman Ruth, Jr. was born on Feb. 6, 1895, to Kate Schamberger-Ruth and George Herman Ruth, Sr., tavern owners who lived at 216 Emory Street, near the present-day Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

Although the couple had eight children, only two survived infancy.

Growing up in a poor Baltimore waterfront neighborhood, the young Ruth was continually getting in trouble and becoming increasingly difficult for his parents to control, particularly with his mother suffering disabling illness (she died when Ruth was a teenager).

At the age of 7, Ruth's father sent him to St. Mary's and signed over custody to the Catholic missionaries who ran the school, which was his home for the next 12 years.

While at St. Mary's, Ruth was trained in the tailoring trade and became a qualified shirtmaker.

"I've read stories that he was so good that when he played for the Yankees and Red Sox he used to repair his own uniform when it was torn," Mike Hoos, the former admissions director of Cardinal Gibbons, said in a 2010 Youtube video.

"I presume that's what he would have been had he not been a baseball player," Hoos said. "He would have gone into the skilled trade of shirtmaking."

Brother Matthias Boutlier, the head of discipline at St. Mary's who was a father figure in Ruth's life, introduced him to game of baseball. Boutlier taught Ruth how to read and write as well as baseball skills.

In 1913, Ruth caught the attention of Jack Dunn, owner of the minor-league Baltimore Orioles. Dunn signed Ruth to a contract in 1914, when the player was 19, earning him the sobriquet "Jack Dunn's baby"--a nickname that stuck for the rest of his life.

Source: Wikipedia, Biography.com


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