With a Single Baseball, Seeking to Connect All 312 Hall of Famers

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/04/nyregion/baseball-hall-of-fame.html

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The wooden sign for Section 39 flapped in the wind and rain as Ralph Carhart walked past it and headed for a grassy expanse in Calvary Cemetery in Queens where, decades ago, poor parishioners were given charity burials in unmarked graves.

Cemetery officials who were expecting his visit had set a temporary marker in the grass that bore the name Cristóbal Torriente, a baseball star known as the Cuban Babe Ruth, who died in poverty in 1938 and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

From his pocket, Mr. Carhart pulled out a faded baseball with the words “The Hall Ball” written in black marker. He nestled it next to the flimsy grave marker and snapped a picture with his phone.

With that, Mr. Torriente became the 287th Hall of Famer that Mr. Carhart has paid homage to since he began his Hall Ball project six years ago.

His mission is to connect with all 312 members of the Baseball Hall of Fame, living and dead, by putting the ball in the hand of every living member and visiting the grave of every deceased member, and taking a commemorative photograph.

He has already visited the grave sites or other significant locations for 227 inductees, he said, and has met 60 living members, including Mike Piazza, the Mets catcher who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in July.

Mr. Carhart, 43, is an avid Mets fan and has tickets to Wednesday night’s wild-card game against the San Francisco Giants to qualify for the next round of the playoffs.

Of the 25 Hall of Famers left on his list, he plans to visit the grave sites or other important places for 12 dead players by May, and hopes to approach the remaining 13 living players, plus any 2017 inductees, by next summer.

Mr. Carhart, a production manager in the department of drama, theater and dance at Queens College, said that after he completes his mission he hopes the Hall of Fame accepts the ball and his photos as part of its permanent collection.

Mr. Carhart, who lives on Staten Island with his wife, Anna, and their two children, said his goal was to create a link between the generations of the game’s greatest stars.

“I’ll never get into the Hall of Fame for my curveball or hitting prowess, so this is my only chance,” he said.

Jon Shestakofsky, a spokesman for the Hall of Fame, said Mr. Carhart’s project “illustrates the seemingly limitless scope of baseball fandom.”

“The Hall Ball’s journey serves as a glowing example of the power and pull of baseball, and the respect and reverence associated with the game’s all-time greats,” Mr. Shestakofsky said, though he would not say if the hall would consider Mr. Carhart’s submission.

“He’s trying to make a human connection with the living and a spiritual connection with those who’ve moved on,” said John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball. He added that when it came to 19th-century baseball history, Mr. Carhart was “about as nerdy as they come, which is high praise from me.”

Mr. Carhart said the project grew out of his love for baseball and genealogy and was born during a family visit to Cooperstown, N.Y., which is home to the Hall of Fame, in 2010. His wife found a baseball in a creek next to Doubleday Field, which is part of the hall’s complex, and it eventually became the Hall Ball.

About two dozen inductees, Mr. Carhart said, are buried in or around the New York City area, while others required more travel.

He has spent about $25,000 in travel expenses for the project so far, he said, including numerous cross-country road trips, visiting 182 towns and cities in 29 states, as well as Puerto Rico and Cuba.

“One thing I learned is how much baseball is woven into the fabric of our country, in all these unusual corners,” he said. “I’d stop in some bar in the middle of nowhere, looking for directions, and see some trophy on the bar, from a local Little League team.”

For the handful of members who do not have a publicly accessible grave site, Mr. Carhart tried to find a location with an intimate connection to the inductee. For the umpire Al Barlick, it was the shaft of a coal mine in Illinois where Mr. Barlick worked as a young man. For Phil Rizzuto, it was a commemorative ball field at Hillside High School in New Jersey.

For two inductees whose ashes were spread in Lake Michigan — the team owner Bill Veeck, and the catcher Mickey Cochrane — Mr. Carhart put the ball on the shoreline and commemorated them together with one photo.

For the slugger Ted Williams, who died in 2002, Mr. Carhart visited the Alcor Life Extension Foundation cryonics lab in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the player’s body is suspended in liquid nitrogen. A tour guide would narrow down the location of Williams’s body only to several shiny metal containers, which Mr. Carhart promptly photographed with the Hall Ball.

Of the remaining living players, including Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax, Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan, Mr. Carhart acknowledged the challenge of getting them to be part of his project, especially because he cannot afford to pay the autograph fees most players charge today. He is not seeking an autograph, but an addition to something he planned to donate for public display.

One of the last grave site trips, he said, would also be a gift to his family for agreeing to family vacations that revolved around the graves of baseball luminaries.

Their reward would be a trip to the grave of Alexander Cartwright Jr., a New Yorker who in the mid-1800s was an influential member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club.

“He’s buried in Hawaii,” Mr. Carhart said. “It’s an interesting story.”

Mr. Carhart said he helped get a headstone installed in 2013 for Sol White, a Negro leagues star who died in 1955 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Frederick Douglass Memorial Park in the Oakwood neighborhood on Staten Island, near Mr. Carhart’s home.

Similarly, Mr. Carhart hopes to have a headstone made for Mr. Torriente, who he began suspecting was buried in Queens after traveling to Cuba in 2014.

Mr. Carhart visited the Cristobal Colon Cemetery in Havana, where it has long been believed that Mr. Torriente, along with other Cuban baseball greats, was buried. The popular account was that his body was exhumed from Queens and transported to Cuba during the regime of the dictator Fulgencio Batista.

While on a tour of the site, Mr. Carhart said, he was pulled aside by a prominent Cuban sportswriter and told, “You should know, my friend, he’s not buried here.” Efforts on Monday to verify whether Mr. Torriente was buried at the Havana cemetery were unsuccessful.

Back in New York, Mr. Carhart researched the Cuban outfielder and found that he had spent his final days dying from tuberculosis at Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island in the East River.

Mr. Carhart obtained Mr. Torriente’s death certificate from city archives. It lists the burial site as Calvary Cemetery, next to the crossed-out words “City Cemetery,” the official name for the potter’s field maintained by the city on Hart Island in the Bronx.

At Calvary recently, cemetery officials said their records indicated that Mr. Torriente’s body was buried in Section 39 and never dug up.

This would make Mr. Torriente the only Hall of Famer buried in an unmarked and forgotten grave, said Mr. Carhart, who added that a gravestone for Mr. Torriente would be long overdue.

“It would be a great affirmation for the worthiness of this project,” he said.