Who really has their mitts on Babe’s bat?

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 Pirates from 1955-76. 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.”

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 recordbreaking homer.

The Hall of Fame reiterated it is confident the bat in its possession is the one Ruth used to hit the historic homer.