Two blocks from Camden Yards, you have reached the rowhouse where the most famous baseball player in history was born on February 6, 1895. George Herman Ruth was born in this modest working-class neighborhood, the son of a saloon keeper, in a two-and-a-half story rowhouse that has been carefully preserved as a museum to the greatest career in the history of the sport. Ruth's early childhood was chaotic — his parents struggled to manage him, and at age seven he was sent to the St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, a Catholic reform school on the western edge of Baltimore, where a Xaverian Brother named Brother Matthias recognized his extraordinary athletic gifts and became his mentor.
Ruth left Baltimore at nineteen to play for the minor-league Baltimore Orioles and was sold to the Boston Red Sox within months. He pitched for Boston, became a sensation, was sold to the Yankees in 1920 in what became known as the Curse of the Bambino, and proceeded to redefine what was possible in baseball. He hit 714 home runs, a record that stood for 39 years.
He played in ten World Series. He is, by most measures, the most dominant athlete in any team sport in American history. The museum displays Ruth's personal memorabilia, photographs, and artifacts from his Baltimore childhood.
Camden Yards, a short walk away, was deliberately built to honor this birthplace — a stadium designed to feel like the 1890s, appropriate for the neighborhood where Ruth began.