Schultz: For sale: a relic from Babe Ruth’s ill-fated year in Brooklyn
From Isaac Schultz at Atlas Obscura on November 4, 2019, with mention of SABR member John McMurray:
Ebbets Field, the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was torn down with a wrecking ball painted like a baseball after the team moved to Los Angeles in 1957. What was left of the stadium was scattered. Its flagpole ended up outside its distant descendant, the Barclays Center. Some seats ended up on Hart Island (the city’s potters’ field), and the marble plaque bearing the stadium’s name ended up in a pile of rubble in New Jersey—but little was left to commemorate the site itself, where Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier and where Babe Ruth spent his brief, ill-fated coaching career. Today, a metal plaque marks the spot of the old stadium’s home plate, in the shadow of the Ebbets Field apartment complex that was built on the site, a few blocks east of Prospect Park. But just like Babe Ruth’s history with the Dodgers, the plaque is easy to miss.
Ruth was many things: a slugger of legendary proportions, a World Series champion many times over, a hard partier, and an icon—perhaps the icon—of the New York Yankees. But despite his professed desire to, Ruth never became manager of his beloved Bronx Bombers. He only coached in Major League Baseball for a year, as a first base coach for the Dodgers in 1938. After that job, Ruth would never work in baseball again. In November 2019, Ruth’s uniform from this uniquely disappointing episode in his otherwise-illustrious career is up for auction.
Read the full article here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/babe-ruth-dodgers-uniform
- Related link: Read more about Babe Ruth as a Brooklyn Dodgers coach in the SABR Baseball Research Journal
Originally published: November 5, 2019. Last Updated: November 5, 2019.