D&R Greenway Land Trust releases new video featuring Babe Ruth’s granddaughter

Little Leaguers and their families will be inspired by watching D&R Greenway’s latest video “Fields of Dreams” featuring sports and the outdoors in the starring role.

Linda Ruth Tosetti, granddaughter of legendary home-run hitter Babe Ruth, tells personal stories about the Babe’s early life and how he became motivated to become a baseball player.

“My grandfather looked up to Father Mathais, a mountain of a man, and Babe stood head and shoulders over the other kids,” Tosetti said in a prepared statement regarding her grandfather’s mentor at a Catholic school.

Viewers are treated to historic photos of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor from Babe Ruth’s youth.

Sports fans will hear the story of how he learned to throw.

The video begins with D&R Greenway trustee James Fiorentino, an artist who has painted many of baseball’s legendary players. Fiorentino was the youngest artist ever to have his art featured in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, when he was only 15 years of age.

Having begun his sports art career with Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, Fiorentino became a college baseball player himself, according to the statement. He talks about the connection he feels to the land while outdoors in the field, and how important this is in forming a lifelong love of nature.

Since 1989, D&R Greenway has permanently protected over 21,000 acres of land in central New Jersey. Fiorentino became vice chair of the Board of Trustees of the land trust in 2019, according to the statement.

Farm View Fields and Greenway Meadows parks in Princeton were both saved from housing developments and preserved in 2001 through the leadership of D&R Greenway. These parks provide baseball and soccer fields, as well as places to walk and experience the outdoors, according to the statement.

In the video, D&R Greenway’s President and CEO Linda Mead shares that being outdoors in nature cultivates creativity and calm in children who are known to have ADHD, according to the statement. The viewer learns that, in fact, Babe Ruth may have had “nature-deficit disorder,” a term coined by author Richard Louv in his book “Last Child in the Woods” published in 2005.

Tosetti insists that, throughout his legendary life, her grandfather was sustained by nature.

“He was a fisherman and huntsman. That’s where he got his solace,” she said in the statement.

During the past year, D&R Greenway partnered with the Trenton Thunder baseball team at Waterfront Park in Trenton where parts of the video were filmed.

“The way many, many people connect with nature and the outdoors is through the sports their children play when they are young,” Mead said in the statement.

High school students from the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s FUTURO program share how they feel when they are out in nature, according to the statement. These students have worked in partnership with D&R Greenway over the past year, learning about nature’s benefits, clean water and open spaces. In contrast to being indoors during the pandemic, these students’ words about “a good lost” while outside on a wide, open field will stick with the viewer for a long time.

Information on the new 7-minute video “Fields of Dreams” can be found on D&R Greenway Land Trust’s website https://drgreenway.org/