FS: Babe Ruth Vintage Original Type 1 Snapshot - Longest HR Ever!

[Billyscards]

FS: Babe Ruth Vintage Original Snapshot from Spring Training in St. Petersburg, FL at Waterfront Park - home of the historic "West Coast Inn Home Run" by Babe in 1934.

Babe hit a 611 foot home run that hit off the West Coast Inn during a game between the Yankees and the Boston Braves. This was Ruth's longest HR and likely the longest HR ever hit in a major league baseball game.

This snapshot features Ruth at bat against the Braves. It is un-dated but features the words "Ruth at Bat" and "New York Yankees + Boston Braves, St. Petersburg, Flo"

Very rare opportunity to own a snapshot photo of Ruth in action at the plate where he would no doubt create another story of his legend. PM me with questions and see pictures.

$750 OBO

The Legend of Babe Ruth’s West Coast Inn Home Run – The Longest Home Run Ever Hit in a Major League Game

In the Spring of 1948, Babe bid his final farewell to Florida, reminiscing with friends, fans & reporters on his “last time around” and how dearly he loved “the Sunshine State”. In each town and ballpark, he was asked about his most treasured memory. In St. Petersburg, his seasonal “home away from home” for many years, he famously recalled what has since become known as the “West Coast Inn Home Run”. This was a reference to a sensationally-long homer he once hit at old Waterfront Park during his decade of Spring Seasons in St. Pete, from 1925 – 1935.

Babe’s Herculean shot to the West Coast Inn was well-known to devoted fans in Florida. As Pete Gallagher of the St. Petersburg Times described it decades later, it was the “Sunshine City’s” “Shot Heard Around the World”. But not until after Babe’s death was it known to the nation, when the preeminent sportswriter of that era, Red Smith, featured the historic home run in a poignant tribute to the King of Clout following his funeral later that year:
“What do you most remember best about this place, Babe?” … “The time I hit that [colorfully-described] ball against that [colorfully-described] hotel.”
Simultaneously, Babe pointed beyond the fence in right-center, at the distinctly-ornate West Coast Inn, where the Boston Braves lodged for many Spring Seasons – aka the “Home of the Braves”.

Though never forgotten among local historians and fans of baseball, the actual date and circumstances of Babe’s astonishing feat eventually became regarded more as myth than fact as years and witnesses passed one by one.
Also obscuring evidence was the 1947 replacement of Waterfront Park with Al Lang Field – “The Other House That Ruth Built” – leaving significant landmarks and distances uncertain to the general populous. Most fortuitously, however, there were devout baseball fans who happened to work for the City of St. Petersburg Survey Office, located only a short walking distance from these sites in subsequent decades. This fact helped not only in the generational re-verification and communication of valuable anecdotal evidence, but, even more importantly in connection to researching the West Coast Inn Home Run, the authoritative affixing of a professionally-precise distance for this truly landmark home run. City surveyors knew it to be a jaw-dropping distance of “between 610- and 612-feet”!

How could this distance be known with such precision? Because Babe actually hit the second-floor porch of the West Coast Inn, with the sphere first bouncing (on a fly) on its front walkway, which, at its closest point, was 610-feet from where Babe smashed his phenomenal “four-bagger”. Though the hotel itself was a few inches short of 624-feet from home plate, “erring on the side of caution” has led over time to an estimated distance of 611-feet. It could have been a few feet more.

…Enter Floridian cousins and best friends, Bob Ward & Tim Reid, long-time fans of Babe, who founded and co-direct the national Committee to Commemorate Babe Ruth. In the 1970’s, both worked for the City of St. Petersburg, Department of Engineering, where they were often regaled by City surveying officials with a wealth of well-informed accounts of Babe’s amazing times and achievements in St. Pete, including, most notably here, the story of what Ward & Reid have since coined “Babe Ruth’s West Coast Inn Home Run”. These accounts were a primary inspiration leading to the 2009 founding of the Committee to Commemorate Babe Ruth.

Determined to establish whether this often now-regarded only mythical home run ever really happened, as old timers had insisted for more than half-a-century, Ward & Reid teamed together with the “Babe Ruth of Babe Ruth historians”, Bill Jenkinson, and long distance home run researcher and graphic artist, Bruce Orser, forming what the Committee calls the “St. Pete Babe Ruth Research Team”. Together, this four-man team has methodically unraveled the mystery of the formerly mythical home run. “Formerly mythical” because – following and building upon a key discovery by Bruce Orser this summer – it has now been expertly and positively confirmed that Babe Babe did indeed hit the West Coast Inn. Not only that, it can be now be said he did it in a hotly-contested Major League Game, during Babe’s last Spring Season in Yankee pinstripes – on the afternoon of Sunday, March 25, 1934.