Babe Ruth

During the many months of modeling and molding it took to create her 9-foot, 800-pound Babe Ruth in bronze, the artist Susan Luery met countless experts and aficionados. Details were researched and debated. Did the Babe wear his belt buckle on the left or right? Was his hat cocked to the side or worn straight? No fact was too small to escape scrutiny. Except one. The bronze Babe, unveiled at the northern Eutaw Street entrance of Oriole Park, is leaning on a bat and clutching on his hip a right-handed fielder’s glove. The real Babe was a lefty. Ms. Luery, who admits to “not being very astute in the fine points of sports,” said she worked with a vintage glove sent over by the Babe Ruth Museum. She says she believed the glove was Ruth’s. Communication error? “Yes,” said Mike Gibbons, the museum director. Or, as Ms. Luery puts it: “It was the right glove on the wrong man or the wrong glove on the right man.”

From The Baltimore Sun, quoted in Parade, December 31, 1995, p. 12