100 Years Later, Is This Babe Ruth's Lost Baseball Bat?

Babe Ruth hit a home run in South Bend a century ago. People have been looking for the bat ever since.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED SEPTEMBER 17, 2026

In the fall of 1926, the biggest star in Major League Baseball — and quite possibly the most famous man in America — went on a monthlong barnstorming tour across North America. On October 23, he came to South Bend, Indiana.

And at the end of the game, amid the hastening darkness, Babe Ruth hit a home run at Playland Park that the South Bend Tribune claims to have measured at 605 feet. The story tells that Ruth jogged out his home run trot and then gifted his bat to a youngster in the stands, a six-year-old named Thomas Hoban, Jr.

Where the bat went after that has been anyone's guess for a hundred years now. It's a treasure hunt that has taken a few hundred hours from my life.

And just as soon as I was ready to call it quits, I got a phone call from an unknown number. The caller left a voicemail.

He told me he thought he had the bat.

I was leaving an event at the St. Joseph County Library when I decided to check my phone.

One missed call. One missed voicemail. One very excited man talking through a recorded message.

I was at his house within 24 hours, and right there on his pool table was a very old baseball bat, one built to the Babe's specifications and stamped with his own monogram.

A few weeks after I stepped away from a few hundred hours of research, I was about to dive right back in again.

I won't bore you with the details of the ten-page report that I wrote about the baseball bat that I saw on that pool table, but I will tell you that every detail about the bat checks out as the kind of stick Babe Ruth would have swung on that magical day in South Bend.

The right length. The right weight. The right copyright year. The right style. The right hardness.

But just because the bat is the kind of bat we would expect Babe Ruth to have used during his appearance in South Bend, that doesn't mean that it is the bat that Babe Ruth used during his appearance in South Bend.

If we were going to prove that, we were going to need a paper trail.

It wasn't going to be easy to find one.

The bat was discovered in an attic on the near northwest side of South Bend in a home that never belonged to anyone named Hoban.

But the home might have belonged to someone who knew the Hobans.

The Hoban family has indicated that they're pretty sure the Babe Ruth bat passed from little Tommy Hoban to his cousin Maurice. Maurice grew up in South Bend. He played baseball at Adams High School. He served in the Navy — specifically in the Pacific Theater — during World War II.

A fellow from South Bend named Ray Campbell did all of those same things at the same time. It was Ray Campbell's old home where the baseball bat was found.

Did the bat pass between the two young men at some point? Purchased? Traded? Gifted? Lost in a schoolyard wager?

Unfortunately, we don't know. There are a hundred reasons that a baseball bat might have been passed between two young men, and 99 of those reasons don't come with a receipt.

In the end, the verdict remains unsatisfying. There is no unbroken line of provenance. There are a whole pile of statements that contain words like “probably” and “more likely than not. A dozen probabilities multiplied together don't equal anything like ironclad.

But still.

In the end it feels more likely than not that the bat I saw on that pool table is the same one that Babe Ruth used to hit one of the most legendary homers in the history of South Bend — and if the Tribune account is to be believed, the longest one of the Bambino's career.

If it's not, then that means that there's another one just like it floating around South Bend somewhere. That seems unlikely, but it seemed just as unlikely that I would get that phone call on that Saturday in March.

And as long as we're talking unlikelihoods, let's talk about the $10,000 prize that's hanging out there for anyone who can provide proof of the Babe Ruth baseball bat.

Collector Doug Shaffer is offering a generous bounty to anyone who can provide any type of photographic evidence that leads to the authentication of the century-old baseball bat. It's not as much a longshot as you might think, and other Babe Ruth bats have been authenticated because photographs showed woodgrain patterns that might as well have been a human fingerprint.

Someone somewhere must have taken a photo of the Babe wielding a baseball bat during that October 23 game at Playland Park. Someone must have taken a photo of young Mr. Hoban showing off his new prized possession in the days following the ballgame.

If you've got those photos in your attic, I'd love see them, but Doug Shaffer would love to see them even more.