With Major League Baseball’s All-Star game this week, I thought this was an interesting post to run today.
The one name synonymous with baseball is: Babe Ruth.
“The Great Bambino” grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and when I was in Maryland this past year, it was major news when the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore announced that they would be closing Cardinal Gibbons High School once the 2010 class graduated in June.
This school has historical significance because it is home to the field where Babe Ruth learned to play baseball.
The Cardinal Gibbons School occupies the campus of the former St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in the City of Baltimore which was opened by the Archdiocese in 1866. It closed in June 1950, and the Cardinal Gibbons School opened in 1962.
So, on a weekend this Spring before the school closed, I stopped by and took some pictures. I brought along some historical photographs of Babe Ruth playing there and tried to find the exact locations where they were taken.
The baseball field young Babe Ruth played on while attending St. Mary’s was still in use this past year. It’s said that, “if Yankee Stadium was the house that Ruth built, then St. Mary’s was the house that built Ruth.”
Only two of the buildings present on the campus remain from the days of St. Mary’s: the fine arts building and the main school building which replaced the former school building which was destroyed by fire in April 1919.
Ruth never forgot where he came from and after he joined the New York Yankees in 1920, he took the St. Mary’s band to major league ballparks to raise money to replace the main school building.
I learned that while the baseball field was a bit different then, I could still find some of the exact spots where the “Babe” learned to play the game.
A grainy picture of St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys as it appeared in roughly 1890. The building in the center burned down in 1919.
The baseball field as it looks today. The smoke-stack is still in its original position and the original fine arts building can still be seen overlooking the baseball field. Centerfield today is where home plate was located when Ruth played here.
The layout of the field has been reversed over time but nearby buildings, in many cases, are unchanged. The wall behind Ruth (in the picture above) now has a dugout built in front of it.
It certainly was an experience to stand on the same field that Babe Ruth did as a boy. In many ways, it shows how eternal our national pastime is.