George Herman Ruth (06/10)

For those of you that didn’t know (myself included), here is how George Herman Ruth became known as Babe Ruth…

When George Herman Ruth was seven years old, his father sent him to St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory and orphanage, and signed custody over to the Catholic missionaries who ran the school. This is where he first learned the game of baseball, thanks to Brother Matthias Boutlier.

n 1913, St. Mary’s Industrial School was playing a game against Mount St. Mary’s University (then college) in Emmitsburg, MD. That day, the game was attended by Joe Engel, a former Mount St. Mary’s student who was now a pitcher for the Washington Senators. Impressed with Ruth’s pitching abilities Engel, along with a teacher at St. Mary’s, Brother Gilbert, brought Ruth to the attention of Jack Dunn, owner and manager of the then minor-league Baltimore Orioles. After watching Ruth pitch in a workout for half an hour, Dunn signed Ruth to a contract. He signed a contract for $250 a month on February 14, 1914.

Since Ruth was only 19 years old, Dunn had to become Ruth’s legal guardian as well; at that time, the age of majority was 25. When the other players on the Orioles caught sight of Ruth, they nicknamed him “Jack’s newest babe.” The reference stayed with Ruth the rest of his life, and he was most commonly referred to as Babe Ruth from then on.

Babe Ruth

Number Game (04/10)

While at Opening Day at Comerica Park I was viewing the statues of Ty Cobb, Charlie Gehringer, Hank Greenberg, Willie Horton, Al Kaline and Hal Newhouser. I started to wonder about the numbers of some of Detroit’s finest players and then I learned the following:

There had been a couple of attempts to use numbers in the major leagues before the idea caught on. In 1916, and again in 1917, the Cleveland Indians experimented with numbers on their sleeves, as did the Cardinals in 1923.

On January 22, 1929, the Yankees became the first team to use numbers regularly, thinking that fans could recognize players more easily that way. Initially, players were given numbers based on the batting order – for example, Babe Ruth batted third, so he wore No. 3. It took until 1937, however, for every team to have their numbers on all their shirts – the last to change being the home uniforms for the Philadelphia A’s.