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Site of Babe Ruth's First Home Run The year was 1914. The Baltimore Orioles had come to Fayetteville for three weeks of spring training that March because Hyman Fleishman, a transplanted Baltimorean, offered them free lodging at his Lafayette Hotel. Joining the Orioles that year was a new player, eighteen-year-old George Herman Ruth. Because he was cherub-faced and the youngest member of the team, the other players started calling him Babe. During an intrasquad game at the old Cape Fear Fairgrounds off Gillespie Street, "the babe" hit a ball 405 feet out of the park, across a corn field, and into a lake, his first unofficial home run as a professional player. He later would go on to hit 714 official home runs in his career, a record broken only by Hank Aaron. The ballpark is gone now; a state highway department office occupies the site. But a historic marker has been erected by the state, thanks to a three-year campaign by Maurice Fleishman, son of Hyman, who as a bat boy for the Orioles saw Babe hit that first home run.
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