Embark on a captivating journey through the life of the legendary Babe Ruth, from his humble beginnings in Pig Town to his towering fame in American baseball. Dive deep into the story behind his iconic status, dispelling myths and revealing the influences that shaped him early on. Explore the man behind the legend, tracing his roots from Pig Town to the pivotal moment he signed his first professional contract.
🌟Babe Ruth: The Man. The Myth. The Legend⚾️
Our narrative delves into the gritty world of early 20th-century baseball, uncovering the forces that propelled Ruth from the minor leagues to the Yankees. Discover intimate details of his life, including his unconventional wedding and his affection for children, offering a glimpse into the private side of this public figure.
⚾️A Legend's Lasting Impact on Baseball History🏆
Concluding our journey, we reflect on Babe Ruth's monumental impact, from the frenzy of his fame to his lasting influence on the Yankees and the sport itself. Through personal stories and historical insights, we paint a vivid picture of Ruth's enduring legacy, echoing through the annals of baseball history.
🔗Episode Links
Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum: https://baberuthmuseum.org/
Curator's Choice - A podcast for history nerds and museum lovers
Embark on a captivating journey through the life of the legendary Babe Ruth, from his humble beginnings in Pig Town to his towering fame in American baseball. Dive deep into the story behind his iconic status, dispelling myths and revealing the influences that shaped him early on. Explore the man behind the legend, tracing his roots from Pig Town to the pivotal moment he signed his first professional contract.
🌟Babe Ruth: The Man. The Myth. The Legend⚾️
Our narrative delves into the gritty world of early 20th-century baseball, uncovering the forces that propelled Ruth from the minor leagues to the Yankees. Discover intimate details of his life, including his unconventional wedding and his affection for children, offering a glimpse into the private side of this public figure.
⚾️A Legend's Lasting Impact on Baseball History🏆
Concluding our journey, we reflect on Babe Ruth's monumental impact, from the frenzy of his fame to his lasting influence on the Yankees and the sport itself. Through personal stories and historical insights, we paint a vivid picture of Ruth's enduring legacy, echoing through the annals of baseball history.
🔗Episode Links
Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum: https://baberuthmuseum.org/
Curator's Choice - A podcast for history nerds and museum lovers
Hi, I'm Ayla Sparks and this is Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers. From ancient relics to modern marvels, each episode of this show features a new museum and a curator's choice of some amazing artifacts housed there. These guardians of history will share insights, anecdotes and the often untold stories that breathe life into the artifacts they protect. Thanks for tuning in to this Mighty Oak Media production and enjoy the show.
Speaker 2:Babe Ruth is probably the most celebrated sports name in at least American sports history. He's the big name. I taught a college course for 23 years and, as a way to identify what I did for a real job, I would ask my students the first night of class how many ever heard of Babe Ruth. Everybody would raise their hand. I would branch out a little bit. How many have heard this is 1989. How many have heard of Brooks Robinson? How many have heard of Cal Ripken? How many have heard this is 1989, how many have heard of Brooks Robinson? How many have heard of Cal Ripken? How many have heard of Dorothy Hamill, et cetera? As the years went by, the hands came up for Babe Ruth. Others faded away. Even Brooks Robinson faded away.
Speaker 1:I don't recognize any of those other names.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like pretty amazing. Until the last semester I taught and one kid did not raise his hand and I said where are you from? And he goes Nairobi.
Speaker 1:Okay, you could have passed, but anyway.
Speaker 2:So Babe Ruth, a very famous name. He is an American icon. How did he get to be that? Where did he come from? He came from the waterfront of Baltimore, where we are right now, and he was born at 216 Emory Street in southwest Baltimore. That's the building that we're in right now. This was the home of his maternal grandparents, Because Kate Ruth, the mommy, and George the father. They were saloon keepers and she didn't want to give birth in a saloon, so she came home to Mommy and Daddy's house and gave birth here.
Speaker 1:Actually in the house.
Speaker 2:In the house. Wow, most children were born in the house, which is when you see the bedroom where he was born and when children anybody sees that bedroom. We explain that this is where Americans, or probably throughout the world people, were born at home with the help of midwives. So Kate's midwife was Minnie Graff, so she helped with the delivery. She was the first of. She gave birth to eight children here and six died in a childbirth or early infancy. Only a sister and babe survived. I met the sister many years later at Mamie and she was a sweet. She was about this tall and looked like Babe Ruth.
Speaker 1:She was just a mini.
Speaker 2:But so he was born here. He did not live here. He stayed for a while while the mother got healthy again. She turned out, by the way, one of the reasons we didn't know this until probably five years ago she was an alcoholic. And when you're the owner of a saloon and you're an alcoholic and you're drinking, the inventory it's not a good thing.
Speaker 2:But that certainly could have contributed to her losing so many babies because of alcohol. That probably happened. George Jr Babe grew up around here. The parents moved several times, but always within proximity to where we are today.
Speaker 2:Okay, and this neighborhood used to be called Pigtown, and parts of it still are, because they ran pigs hogs to market through the streets back in the day. So he grew up in Pigtown and ran the streets, was incorrigible as the phrase went back in the day. The vernacular has changed quite a bit since then. But he also was truant. He didn't like to go to school and he really became a problem for his parents. A law was passed, I think by the state in maybe 1901, that said if your kid's truant, he will become and has repeated offenses. This new law says that he will become a ward of the state. They're going to take him away. So his parents said we're not going to do that, we're going to put him in St Mary's Industrial School, which was like a prison, in other words, when you went in there you were not coming out. It was hard to get out, yeah.
Speaker 1:Is that why people thought that he was an orphan? Is because he grew up in this school.
Speaker 2:Right. People thought he was an orphan and because there were orphans there, there were kids there, that from all different backgrounds, but they all had one thing in common and that was that they had a very poor home life or no home life.
Speaker 2:So, they went into St Mary's, which was run by a Catholic order called the Azverian Brothers, and so he went there when he was seven years old in 1902. He mostly stayed there until Valentine's Day 1914, when he signed a professional contract with the Baltimore Orioles to play baseball. So for that span of time, 12 years, he grew up at St Mary's Industrial School where he was learning to be a shirt maker. Every kid was given a trade and they were taught something so that when they got to be 21 years old they would be released and off they would go and they would have potential employment through the skills that had been taught them. He did come home from time to time.
Speaker 2:His mom died oh, what year was this? You can look it up, kate Ruth, but let's say it's 1911. She died of tuberculosis. She and her husband had split up because of the alcoholism in 1906. So things were not good at home. But Babe did come home for his mom's funeral and maybe for Christmas or something he would get out every once in a while.
Speaker 2:But in the meantime there was a man, a father, at St Mary's Industrial School by the name of Brother Matthias. He was a giant of a man, let's say six feet four, something like that, and he taught Ruth how to play baseball and he taught him well and Babe had incredible skills and developed a reputation around town as a young teenager of being this extraordinary ballplayer. When I got down here it was still at a time so in the very early 80s where I could reach out and find people who played baseball against Babe Ruth or with Babe Ruth. So I pulled in a lot of really great firsthand impressions of what he was like and he evidently must have been the cat's meow. He always was the cat's meow as a ball player.
Speaker 1:He was the total babe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, look at you. Anyway, he stayed there. In 1913, the year before he got signed, there was a big game between St Mary's and Mount St Joseph High School, which was not too far away, in the same proximity west side of Baltimore, and St Joe's still exists today and has produced many fine athletes over the years baseball, basketball, wrestling, whatever. Mark Teixeira, who is a famous Major League Baseball player, went to Mount St Joe. I talked with him about you know years later, about whether Ruth's impression was still upon the school, and he said, oh know years later about whether Ruth's impression was still upon the school and he said, oh yeah, especially the baseball team. Everybody knows that Babe Ruth played on this field and that kind of stuff, but anyway.
Speaker 2:So this big game between St Joe and St Mary's occurred at the end of the season in 1913. Ruth pitched for St Mary's and a guy named Morissette pitched for Mass. Both were considered prospects, good pitchers, and Ruth obliterated him, just outperformed all over the place. In attendance that day, among the thousands who showed up for that game, was a fellow by the name of Jack Dunn. The thousands who showed up for that game was a fellow by the name of Jack Dunn. So Jack Dunn came to the game because he was the owner and manager of the minor league Orioles. So he had heard about these two kids and he went out and he was impressed with both of them, but especially with Ruth.
Speaker 2:And so on Valentine's day of 1914, he went to St Mary's Industrial School and met with Brother Matthias and other administrators from the school and he said I would like to offer George Ruth a professional contract to play baseball. And Ruth, who was 19 years old he was underage, he had to be 21 to get out. So they said OK, we want George to do well, we understand that he's really a wonderful baseball player, but you're going to have to sign guardian papers to get him out of here. Jack Dunn said OK, I will be his legal guardian.
Speaker 1:Until he was 21.
Speaker 2:And off they went. It was really a nebulous thing, but the school had to do it. Dunn did it. So they took off for Fayetteville, north Carolina, spring training, and they went in a little bit after Valentine's Day, like mid-February, they took off to go down there and they went by train.
Speaker 2:Ruth, the story goes, had to walk through a snowstorm like a blizzard to get to the train station. So he said goodbye to his father who was living in over top of his bar that was located at Oriole Park, where Oriole Park is today. There were buildings there before and so he was there and he took off and he walked a couple of miles to the train station, got on the train with other players and off they went to North Carolina. They were put in sleepers and so they slept overnight one night and each of these sleeper cars or berths had netting where I guess you could put your belongings. So you're laying there and you've got a window and then there's this net that's hanging right there and the players told rookie Ruth, this is for you to put your pitching arm in, to make sure that it's nice and safe when we get down there and of course he did it.
Speaker 2:And then he woke up the next morning and he couldn't move his arm, he was just a mess. But anyway, off. He went to Fayetteville, north Carolina, and he discovered the world there. He had never ridden a bicycle, he had never been in an elevator, so evidently he was going up and down in the elevators and so he almost killed himself on the bicycle.
Speaker 2:And according to stories we have some really wonderful coverage of that spring training 1914, through the Baltimore Sun. They had a reporter on site by the name of Jesse Lin, training 1914, through the Baltimore Sun. They had a reporter on site by the name of Jesse Linthicum and so we have Jesse's recollection and writing covering that spring training in the first inter-squad game that they played. And they did this. They trained at a horse race track in the middle and Ruth in his first at-bat hit the longest home run in the history of North Carolina and if you go to Fayetteville there is a plaque that marks the spot. So people immediately knew that this was something extraordinary. Now George Ruth is with the team and with his guardian and manager and owner, jack Dunn. The players started calling George Ruth Jack Dunn's baby and that's where Babe came from and you will see by maybe March 11th or in that vicinity, they refer to him as Babe Ruth. That's where it came from, so it's a good story.
Speaker 1:And it's a good story. And, to be fair, I mean, he was the guardian as well.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't just. That's it Jack Dunn's baby. He's got him.
Speaker 1:And he kept that, so it must have meant a lot to him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So anyway, ruth goes along. He does extremely with the Orioles when they start playing real baseball in April. But there was an issue for Jack Dunn and that was Jack Dunn is a minor league team and Jack Dunn plays here. This is a ballpark, okay, across the street, literally across the street, was another ballpark and that was occupied by the Federal League Baltimore Terrapins. This was a startup league. First year they were considered major league caliber, minor league caliber, major league caliber. Even though George Ruth plays, or Babe Ruth plays, for minor league, orioles, federal League, terrapins or major league, they outdraw minor league team to the extent that minor league team sells its best players and moves to Richmond just to try to salvage the franchise, which he did. And then he came back to Baltimore, like next year or whatever. But he sold Babe Ruth and two other top players to the Boston Red Sox.
Speaker 1:I was curious why he would have done that. When I was looking through I was like why would he get rid of this amazing player that he discovered?
Speaker 2:Because back then minor league today minor leagues are affiliated with major league teams officially. Okay, so that the Orioles have four minor league teams plus a rookie thing, but I won't confuse you with that and each of those teams does whatever the major league franchise wants them to do. So the Orioles have some really good players at their highest minor league level in Norfolk and if the Orioles say we want that guy, he's on a plane and he's here. In Jack Dunn's era they were not affiliated directly with major league clubs, so minor league owners could keep their players until the price got right. But in this case Dunn had no choice. He had to cut payroll and he did.
Speaker 2:And so Ruth goes off and he significantly. When he got to Boston he didn't stay long. They sent him to the team that they most affiliated with in Providence, rhode Island. So they sent him there because they didn't think he was ready to play Major League Baseball at that point. And before he went he met a woman named Helen Woodford and he brought her home with him after the season and married her in Old Ellicott City at St Paul's Church, which still exists to this day.
Speaker 2:Now, if you go to the church and you will go in and you go God, babe Ruth got married right there. He didn't. He got married in the rectory. We didn't know that till later, and the reason is because Ruth was raised as a Catholic but Helen was not, so it was a mixed marriage religiously. And so I found this out because I took a reporter from the Chicago Tribune who was doing a story on Babes Baltimore or whatever.
Speaker 2:So we go to the church and I'm. So here's a church where this is maybe 10 years ago, here's a church where he got married, and so the priest, that kind of led us around and stuff. He goes no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'll show you where he got married. So he takes us to the rectory and we go into the priest's office and he goes he got married in my office, which was not my office at that time or anybody's office, but that's where he got married. That happened. We have the marriage certificate upstairs on display. It's kind of cool.
Speaker 1:That's very cool.
Speaker 2:One of the fun things that I discovered about being in the position of being the director of this museum, which my son refers to as dad. Don't get too headstrong because, remember, you run a row house.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And I'm like and um, there is a book in me which I've been too busy to write, but it's, it's going to reference in the title how to run a row house or something, something. But anyway, what I found was that there's, there was a lot of stuff that survived the pillages of time relative to Babe Ruth, because it was Babe Ruth and people knew early on, even when he was at St Mary's, that he was somebody special, so people kept things. How in the heck is it that we have the marriage certificate from that, his first professional game as an Oriole? We have the official box score that the scorer kept and we've got it.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So we have a fair amount of stuff on early Ruth and all that good stuff.
Speaker 1:That's really not normally the case. Almost in every single situation for a historical, famous figure, you look for the scraps that were kept on accident in somebody's drawer. Yeah, that's right. So it's remarkable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's pretty wild, a very frustrating thing relative to precious artifacts pertaining to Babe Ruth. We have every kid at St Mary's got a hymnal okay, this little brown and maybe 30 pages in it and it had hymns and prayers and different things. And so this brown covered book on the inside cover, somebody found it under the floorboards of a building at St Mary's because they were converting St Mary's to become a Catholic high school called Cardinal Gibbons. On the inside cover faded. It said George H Ruth, world's worst W-O-R-S-E singer, world's best pitcher. We had an FBI handwriting forensics dude, analyze the writing. And he said without a doubt and he compared it with other Babe Ruth stuff he said it's real. We tried to get it appraised and people would not touch it because and this is maybe five years ago, because the world of sports collectibles has gotten outrageous Everything is so much money involved and that kind of stuff. But it's hurtful to me that we cannot declare that an authentic piece of memorabilia. We can only suggest that it is.
Speaker 1:I don't understand why they wouldn't touch it, though. What was the reasoning? Just mum.
Speaker 2:Because they would not authenticate it. They said this does not look like Babe Ruth's writing. He was 12 years old. People's handwriting changes, but the FBI guy has shown you beyond reasonable doubt that there are. I think it's a Palmer School of cursive that they taught back then that many of the letters in this little thing that he did, george H Ruth Worshinger, corresponded with his adult writing. But they wouldn't buy it. I'm telling you, this FBI guy did this immense report on this, like 100 pages of information, and look at this and point pictures and all this stuff, and they won't do it because I guess it might sully their reputations as authenticators or whatever.
Speaker 2:Anyway, that's a frustrating part of working in the world of sports collectibles. All right, it's a brutal world out there because everything has a price tag. When I first came here in the early 80s it was not that way, and so that if you had a Babe Ruth autographed baseball and you wanted to sell it, maybe a hundred bucks and before the 80s were finished that number had become a thousand bucks and today it might be $50,000. There's a Babe Ruth rookie card, in other words a baseball card that depicts Babe Ruth as an Oriole pitcher. So 1914, here is his baseball card. It's his rookie card. They're few and far between $7 million. I'll show you the card upstairs.
Speaker 1:Is it the red card, the little red, the one that's got like red around?
Speaker 2:the edges. There is a red version and a blue version. We currently show the blue version. We were showing red version before, but that one got sold for $10 million. So this one is a lesser quality and it's blue and it's $7 million.
Speaker 1:Wow, pretty cool, pretty cool, yeah, and it's $7 million.
Speaker 2:Wow, pretty cool, pretty cool, yeah. So anyway, ruth years with the Red Sox, gets traded or sold to the Yankees in 1920. But in the time that he was with the Red Sox he would come home after the baseball season and stay with his father. So Helen and Babe would come home In the first two years, not the first, 1915 and 1916,. When he came home he played in an exhibition game where they would take local guys from Catonsville, which is Westside, and Irvington, which is Westside Mount St Joe is in Irvington and thousands of people would come out to see this because Babe was already Babe.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure all the rest of the players are like oh, what are we going to do? We can't compete.
Speaker 2:We have photographs from both years and the crowds are astonishing. It's amazing. But the Baltimore Sun was there with a camera and I showed Teixeira these photographs and he said, yeah, there's home plate and there's first base. What's happened is that they use the same field but they reversed it, so home plate is here and then first base is that way. He said otherwise it's. You can see the hill and where the people were and I'm like, yeah, so to share a love that he thought that was really cool.
Speaker 2:So Babe goes to New York and he turns that city upside down. And if you think about the roaring 20s, the epicenter for the roaring 20s in America is Manhattan. It's New York City and Ruth who gets there. In 1920, his energy, bigger than life, Manhattan, New York City, took on that persona. In 1994, we went to New York for Yankees' Old-Timers Day, where a lot of the old players who had been with the Yankees would come back and just really celebrate the dynasty that the New York Yankees were and still are. They've won more championships than any other professional team in the history of the world, A lot of it having to do with Babe Ruth.
Speaker 1:I was going to say because it stopped after he left for a while there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:It's crazy that one player genuinely had that big of an impact on a team.
Speaker 2:You're too young to have lived through Beatlemania so that when the Beatles boom exploded on America in 1964, I was 17 years old and I was like holy. We all were just stunned. It was the biggest thing of our lifetime. And Ruth was the same way when he hit New York. There was nothing like it. So in 94, I'm up there with a sound crew, two guys, and we're interviewing Yankees what does Babe Ruth mean to the Yankees? And they would all talk.
Speaker 2:The mayor of New York showed up that day, rudy Giuliani, and I put a microphone in front of him. I said, Mayor, tell me what Ruth means to New York City. And he gave me a minute and a half. It was amazing. He was great. Too bad, too bad. What happened, rudy? You got way out of whack with yourself there. So Ruth went there, bigger than life, the first player to endorse merchandise there's I can show you Babe Ruth underwear for little children in the back there. The first to have a player agent. Player agents happen all the time. Now Everybody's got an agent, it's just common, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:If you're a professional athlete, you have an agent unless you choose not to. The Ravens have a quarterback named Lamar Jackson. He has chosen not to have a representative. He negotiates his own deals. Okay, but there are not many of them. Most guys have agents. Babe had the first. He had the first one. He's the first athlete to have a business card. Think about that. So there's all this stuff with Babe Ruth, that he's the first and he set 206 individual records, 206 records he broke or set for Major League Baseball. Most of those have since been broken. A couple still remain, but he's astonishing. So let's say the Chicago Cubs, a baseball team at that time. Let's say that they hit 20 home runs as a team. Because the game was different then. There weren't a lot of home runs hit, it was called small ball. They ran. You get a single, you go to first base. Next guy bunts and moves man to second and the object was to get runs across the plate any way you could.
Speaker 1:So small plays rather than a big, large hit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just whatever. You would steal a base, you would move up on an error, you would get a bass. You would move up on an error, you would get a single, you would get a double or a walk or whatever. When Babe Ruth came home run, everybody was like what the hell was that? And it just became the thing. The Yankees didn't have enough seats where they were playing to house his celebrity, to host his celebrity, so they built Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built. It opened in 1923. 60,000 people come out to see Babe Ruth play Wherever he went. Everybody came out. Wherever the Beatles went. When they showed up, people just…so it's phenomenal.
Speaker 1:He wasn't just a good baseball player. He was an American cultural icon. He was revolutionizing everything.
Speaker 2:Everything. Most people never got to see Babe Ruth play because radio really didn't come into its own to the extent that we had coverage of baseball games on the radio until the mid-20s. Okay, if you did not live in a city where an American League team was or a National League team that made it to the World Series against the Yankees, you didn't get to see Babe Ruth right. So he became mythic in a sense because he was invisible and you could follow him on the movie reels that they had.
Speaker 2:And they did something back then in the 20s called barnstorming. So after the season Babe Ruth and his pal Lou Gehrig another celebrated player they would put together a group of professionals and they would go to little cities all over the United States, mostly out West, where baseball major league baseball was not played at that time. So they would go into a town in Iowa and they would play in front of 5,000 people who would come out and Iowa would get a representative team of their best, like high school players or whatever, and they would play the Babe Ruth team or whatever. So that's how people got to see a little bit of Babe Ruth, andbut otherwise he was just this guy who they could only really dream about.
Speaker 1:An enigma, absolute enigma right there yeah.
Speaker 2:When Babe Ruth turned 100 in 1995, in the year leading up to that, we found people who had met. Babe Ruth turned 100 in 1995, in the year leading up to that we found people who had met Babe Ruth when they were kids and Babe Ruth signed a billion baseballs. Upstairs we have on display some of the baseballs that people gave us that they had received when they were a child from Babe Ruth, and everybody had a story. So one guy would say we were up in Maine and we heard that Babe Ruth was coming to visit a friend of ours or a friend of my parents, and so we all lined up in the street to look at him and that kind of stuff. They all had great stories. They're all dead now, they're all gone. Anyway, ruth has a zillion stories and one of the fascinating, wonderful aspects of my job is that new stories are always coming.
Speaker 2:Or his ancestor had collected the box scores, the way that you record a baseball game and the next day the newspaper will put the box score in so you can read this guy had four at-bats, he scored two runs, or whatever. He had the box scores for every World Series game played between 1909 and 1930. So that means it's also an incredible collection, because we're not privy to that kind of. I mean, you could probably pull that research, but these are box scores clipped out of newspapers. But Ruth played in 10 World Series. This span, 1909 to 1930, represents nine of those World Series. The only one that it doesn't cover was his last World Series, which was 1932. So we plan on making a graphic showing all of Babe Ruth's box scores in the World Series. That's cool.
Speaker 2:Now this here put those on. This is fairly cool and this has not been appraised. This is a ball that Babe Ruth hit for a home run. I don't know how many of these are around.
Speaker 1:That is so cool.
Speaker 2:Now what we do to interpret so this ball and whoever caught it I think it's home run number 462 or something like that. This is going to go on display because Babe Ruth Museum turns 50 on July 19th. You should probably. We're going to do a party on July 26th, but anyway, this was donated to us recently, so it's never been on display. But see that the stitches are black and red.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm alternating or blue and red American League Baseballs had this stitching at this time in the 20s and 30s and stuff like that. So that helps us to determine that this thing is authentic for sure. Here is another one Now. This one here's a Babe Ruth autograph, but you see the ball just just like now. This ball is in not very good shape. This ball is in much better shape, but the enemy of autographs on baseballs or other things is light.
Speaker 2:As we learned our lessons growing up down here, we would put a Babe Ruth autographed baseball on display with a good signature and about five years later you could buy the display case and go uh-oh, where'd the signature go? It's starting to fade and things have to go off display. Yeah, and that's kind of what happened with the Babe Ruth hymnal is that we had it on display and over time it faded, although it's in pencil on this brown paper, so it was never really easy to see. Fortunately, we took pictures of it early on so we know what it looked like when it was in its best shape, but anyway, so that's always a challenge for us to do stuff like that. So now you've held a very rare Babe Ruth Hermon baseball so that, yeah, people will listen. That's what he's known for home runs right.
Speaker 1:I'm basically now a huge Babe Ruth fan because I had no like. Genuinely, as someone who isn't interested in sports, this was fantastic. But in your opinion, with all of your history and knowledge, why is baseball known as America's pastime?
Speaker 2:I think, because when it came along, you have to trace the history of America becoming industrialized. It started off with a bunch of farmers, whatever, and small towns, but then, as industry grew, people ended up getting jobs. And this is like the middle of the 19th century that we started to convert and cities started to grow and people would get factory jobs and things like that. But as they got factory jobs, if you're a farmer you're working seven days a week.
Speaker 1:Your family's, working seven days a week.
Speaker 2:Every day, everybody's working and doing that, my point being that by the time people stopped being an agricultural gig and more of an industrial gig, they got time off.
Speaker 1:So we started being able to have pastimes.
Speaker 2:And baseball coincidentally started as the industrial gig was getting its legs under it. And so off it goes and club teams start to show up on the East Coast, northeast mostly. Baseball was being played in Baltimore and Washington and New York and Boston and all over. So here and then the Civil War happened and all the guys who were playing baseball in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic went into the Army and they started playing baseball. So guys in California or whatever, iowa, they learn how to play baseball and then the war ends and they all go home and to play baseball. And then the war ends and they all go home and they play baseball.
Speaker 2:So now the first professional team occurred in 1876, cincinnati Reds. They're the first pro team. So there they are and off we go making leagues and things like that. The Orioles, our team, took its name. They had been the Baltimore Baseball Club and they started off in the 70s, 1870s as well. And in 1882, they were in a league called the American Association and there was a Mardi Gras kind of event that occurred in Baltimore every year and it was put on by the Order of the Oriole and so Oriole kind of became part of the local vernacular and people started referring to the baseball team as our Orioles in 1882. So they have been the Orioles ever since 1882. Now different iterations American Association, national League, american League, minor League, american League. So it's changed, but they've always stayed the Orioles. They wear orange and black. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:That's very cool, yeah, so for people who want to come and visit, you made a point to tell me earlier, which I think is really important, that this is not just about Babe Ruth, this museum. You talk about the history of sports in the area. What do you want people to know about the museum?
Speaker 2:That we represent and work to preserve and maintain the legacy of America's most celebrated athlete, babe Ruth. He's the guy. However, over years, we have come to take on the mantle of being the museum official museum of the Baltimore Orioles, the official archives of the Baltimore Colts, one of the storied NFL franchises of all time. We represent the Baltimore Ravens, we represent the Maryland Terrapins, we represent Towson University Athletics. We represent Johns Hopkins University Lacrosse. I'm Michael Phelps. Have you ever heard of him?
Speaker 1:I have.
Speaker 2:Well, michael Phelps is in the archives right behind us, along with dozens and hundreds of individual athletes and sports teams in this state. Maryland is a very small state with a very big sports imprint on the nation. Babe Ruth came from here, cal Ripken came from here, michael Phelps came from here. These are all local athletes who have. Katie Ledecky is from here.
Speaker 2:We're really quite something, not to mention the fact that we've had great champion sports teams forever, and the oldest professional sports organization in the United States dating back, I think, to 1797, is the Maryland Jockey Club, pimlico horse racing. It's the oldest historical organization in sports in the United States. So we have a lot going for us that way and I think, as far as I'm concerned, the success of my job has been to collate all this, to bring it all under one roof so that we've got the history and we interpret the history through the exhibits and displays that we do, and maybe someday you'll be lucky enough to work for us on a project or something because you like history Anytime, because we who work here and there are only a few of us getting ready to come down these steps we are historians. I mean, I know a lot about American history and I follow it, and so I'm not primarily a sports fan, although I am a sports fan, but I'm a history guy as well, which helps me do my job in sports history, for sure.
Speaker 1:This was really incredible and interesting, so thank you. Thank you so much for tuning in and supporting Curator's Choice, a Mighty Oak Media production. If you enjoyed the show, please consider subscribing and rating the show on Apple Podcasts, spotify, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. If you love a museum and would like to hear it featured in an episode, shoot me a message at curatorschoicepodcast at gmailcom. I'll do my best to reach out and see if I can get them to be on the show. You can also view articles, artifacts and more by following us on Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for listening to Curator's Choice, a podcast for history nerds and museum lovers.