Lingan Priest Taught Babe Ruth How To Play Baseball

Many Cape Bretoners love baseball. We also have some interesting connections to the sport. In fact, it was a priest born in Lingan, Cape Breton that was a father figure to the legendary Babe Ruth and taught him how to play ball.

Martin Leo “Matthias” Boutilier was a Cape Breton boy who moved to Boston with his parents at a young age. He later became a priest and was an assistant director at St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore. It was there he met and became a mentor to Babe Ruth, a boy who lived there as a "delinquent", separated from his family for persistent unruly and illegal behaviour.

Ruth would go on to call Boutilier the "greatest man I've ever known".

Read more from Cape Breton writer Paul MacDougall.


The Man who inspired the Babe - Paul MacDougall for the Cape Breton Post

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