A tale of two bats, and Babe Ruth’s record-making 60th home run in 1927
NEW YORK — As part of its collection of Babe Ruth items, the Baseball Hall of Fame says it has the bat the slugger used to hit his then-record 60th home run in 1927.
A private collector also claims to own the bat, and he’s selling it at auction. PSA/DNA, one of the leading sports memorabilia authenticators, supports his assertion.
The dispute dates back more than 90 years to the original owner of each bat and how he professed to acquire it.
The bat being sold by the anonymous collector can be traced back to Joe E. Brown, the entertainer and vaudeville comedian with whom Ruth had a friendship. Brown said Ruth, who had presented him with the bat the slugger used to hit three home runs in the 1926 World Series, personally gave him the bat used to hit his 60th homer in 1927. The bat is signed, “To Joe E. Brown From Babe Ruth.”
Brown then passed the bat down to his son Joe L. Brown, who was general manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 195576. The younger Brown then sold the bat to a collector.
“There is documentation back to [Joe L.] Brown’s ownership and his talking about the bat that goes back to a sports writers’ luncheon in 1948,” PSA authenticator Jon Taube told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “Even before that the bat is mentioned from his collection in a 1939 baseball centennial celebration. … We also have a letter that continues the story from his grandson Ty Brown that talks about the bat coming out at Christmas time.”
The bat in the Hall of Fame was given to the museum by sports writer James Kahn in 1939, and Kahn was quoted in the Otsego Farmer — a newspaper in Cooperstown, where the Hall of Fame is located — as saying at the time that then-Yankees manager Miller Huggins gave him the bat after the game on Sept. 30, 1927.
Taube, who has done extensive research on Ruth’s bats, doesn’t dispute Kahn was given a bat after that game, but he doesn’t believe it was the one used for the record-breaking homer.
“It’s very unlikely that on Sept. 30, Miller Huggins comes down into the locker room and says, ‘Babe, give me the bat that you broke the record with’ and then he hands it to a beat writer,” Taube said. “And we just think it was very unlikely Huggins came out of the dugout and handed him THE bat. He handed him a bat, there’s no question about that. Was it the bat that hit the 60th home run? I doubt that very highly.”