Some of the best 14-year-old baseball players in the world visited Hot Springs in August for the Babe Ruth World Series. It seemed appropriate that the Spa City hosted a youth organization named after Ruth, who so enjoyed his visits here.

Steve Arrison, chief executive officer of Visit Hot Springs, called it "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to showcase our city, its attractions and the wonderful Majestic Park sports complex."

Majestic, which is on a site that once housed the Hot Springs Boys and Girls Club, has become a hub for youth and collegiate sports, attracting tournaments that bring people from across the region to Hot Springs. It starts each winter with the Mike Dugan Invitational for college teams. Majestic Park officials collaborate with the Arkansas Travelers in North Little Rock for camps and scholarships, and they partner with area schools for tournaments.

"Having athletes play at Majestic Park is especially meaningful for them since this is the very spot where Babe Ruth trained and played in the early years of the 20th century," says Derek Phillips, the park's general manager. "They enjoy playing on Babe Ruth Field and seeing our larger-than-life bronze statue of the Babe, one of only three like it in the world."

As far back as 1993, Little Rock native Jay Jennings was chronicling the history of baseball in Hot Springs. He wrote an article for Sports Illustrated headlined "When Baseball Sprang for Hot Springs."

"Hot Springs has drawn media attention as the boyhood home of President Bill Clinton, but few people know that it also played a crucial role in the early years of baseball," Jennings wrote. "It was the place where spring training came of age. From 1886 to the 1920s, Hot Springs was baseball's most popular preseason training spot. Though National Association teams began traveling south as early as 1869 when the New York Mutuals visited New Orleans to play exhibition games, manager Cap Anson is widely credited with creating the first organized spring training camp."

The Sporting News once called Hot Springs "the Mecca of professional baseball players."

"The site was not so odd as it may seem now," Jennings wrote. "In the last two decades of the 19th century, Hot Springs was a celebrated spa. Though its population was only about 10,000, there were always thousands of tourists in town. The town's popularity stemmed, as you might guess, from its water.

"Hydropathy was in its heyday, and with pure mineral water bubbling up from the earth at 143 degrees and huge bathhouses to serve its visitors, Hot Springs promoted itself as America's Baden-Baden, after the famous German spa. To help bathers fill leisure time between their therapeutic dips, entrepreneurs built theaters and casinos. And many staged sporting events."

The city's minor league baseball team was called the Bathers. The team competed in the Cotton States League from 1938-41 and from 1947-55.

It wasn't until the 2000s, however, that........

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