Steve Morano
MSMU Class of 2024
(12/2023) Throughout the nearly two centuries of America’s pastime, baseball history has reached every single corner of the country. From the Major Leagues all the way to the days of townball, the game has had a profound impact on every community. Even in western Maryland, baseball history has been made in every corner. In places like Hagerstown, where the great Willie Mays made his debut in white baseball with the minor league Trenton Giants at the old Municipal Stadium in 1950 before his career with the New York/San Francisco Giants took off. In Gettysburg, where the three-time World Series and Hall of Famer Eddie Plank was born, raised, and taught the game. And, by happenstance, in Emmitsburg.
On the campus of Mount Saint Mary’s University, an information plaque lies between Echo Field, the spiritual home of Mount Athletics, and the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. A picture of an unnamed priest and the legendary baseball player, George Herman "Babe" Ruth takes up the information display. Along with facts about his career, the plaque describes Ruth’s visit to the Mount in May of 1921. This was a token to the place where Ruth was supposedly discovered by a scout of Jack Dunn, the owner of the minor league Baltimore Orioles of the International League in 1913. This, like many things in the history of the game and the legend of Babe Ruth, is heavily debated.
Born in Baltimore to German American parents, Ruth grew up in an industrious time for the city that, at the time, was considered a baseball Mecca. The National League Baltimore Orioles of the pre-MLB era won back-to-back-to-back pennants from 1894-1896, with Ruth coming into the world right before their second pennant push in 1895. But that is only on the side of white baseball. The Baltimore Weldon-Giants, the preeminent Negro League team in the city were a successful brainstorming team of the pre-league era of black baseball. Ruth would have grown up with baseball as his life blood.
But the young Ruth was a troublemaker, perhaps because he was around his father’s saloon too much. The man that would become one of the greatest baseball players of all time started drinking, chewing tobacco, and stealing money from the registers of his father’s business by the age of six. His parents were unable to control him, so they sent him to west Baltimore to attend St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in 1904 at the age of nine. The young Ruth, scared from the bullying of his fellow classmates and exhausted from the manual labor required of the boys in the schools’ factories pushed him to run away several times before settling down. But this was the place that baseball truly became a part of his life.
The Canadian-born Xaverian Brother Mathias, a tall religious man of Irish ancestry was the school’s baseball coach. Imitating his swing, Ruth learned to belt baseballs from Mathias swing and quickly rose through the ranks of the inter-school league to be on the team that played other boarding schools like St. Mary’s. This was the situation that Ruth found himself in when St. Mary’s Industrial School played the Mount’s prep school baseball team. At the turn of the century, Mount Saint Mary’s had a prep school were boys under the age of 18 could attend. Not much is known of the meeting between the Mount’s Prep school and St. Mary’s in 1913, but it is thought that this is where a scout for Jack Dunn’s Baltimore Orioles discovered the young Ruth and signed him to a contract. The rest is history, or so the story goes.
Ruth’s trip back to the Mount in 1921, nearly a year and a half into his tenure with the New York Yankees, was a show of appreciation to the institution where he was discovered. Giving a "batting exhibition," students of the Mount and citizenry from across the area flocked to echo field to watch the Maharajah of Mash swing the bat. But this was not the only batting exhibition or game that Ruth played at places where he was "discovered." In fact, Mount St. Mary’s isn’t even the place where the Society of American Baseball Research or SABR claims Ruth was discovered.
The place that SABR recognizes the place that Ruth was discovered was Mount Saint Joseph College in west Baltimore, the rival institution to St. Mary’s. It is their reasoning that Brother Gilbert, the athletic director of Mount Saint Joseph at the time used Ruth as a diversion. This was done to take Dunn’s attention away from Gilbert’s star southpaw Ford Meadows. This is the preeminent historical society of Baseball’s view of the Ruth discovery narrative, not the one the Mount recognizes. Ruth even went back to Mount Saint Joseph in 1922 and 1923 to give a batting exhibition and to play an exhibition game in front of crowds just like the ones at the Mount.
Giving the same treatment to his rival high school as he did with Mount Saint Mary’s, Ruth has become a conundrum for those wishing to discover the truth of his legend, but the man is exactly that—a legend. A person where mystique often trumps reality and where the stories of an American legend are often told by the newspaper writers of the 1920s could be a hard case to dissect, but there are often many truths to one’s tale. It is not impossible to think that Ruth, in some way, may have been scouted at the Mount by Dunn, as he did with many other stars at that time. And it is also not impossible to think that Brother Gilbert told Dunn about Ruth as a diversion to keep Meadows. These are all things that can be factored into the aura of Babe Ruth.
Whether the story of Ruth’s discovery at either Mount Saint Mary’s or Mount Saint Joseph’s are real is out of the question. There are some discrepancies with both stories, but there are also some truths. The fact of the matter is that Babe Ruth visited both places at the height of his career to pay tribute to two institutions that he believed made him in some way. That alone gives credence to both places being in some way responsible for his discovery. But with many things regarding the Bambino, the story may be far from the truth.
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