The Hall Ball: One Fan’s Journey
My foreword to Ralph Carhart’s new book
I met Ralph Carhart through the Society for American Baseball Research, and our mutual interest in placing headstones on the unmarked burial sites of the game’s pioneers. We worked together to place a marker on the burial plot of Knickerbocker Base Ball Club icon James Whyte Davis (https://bit.ly/2vZJutG) and then Sol White. We even formed the 19th Century Baseball Grave Marker Project, as a subcommittee of SABR’s research group dedicated to baseball in our favorite century. Ralph has headed that project for some time now as it has continued its noble work. His fine new book will be published soon, by McFarland, and I encourage you to read it: https://amzn.to/37Rer0d.
“A stone can tell the story of a man,” the author notes gravely, having visited the final resting places of so many historical figures. And so can the absence of a stone, as with the long unmarked burial site of baseball pioneer James Whyte Davis, at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a veritable city of the dead for early baseball.
What inspired Ralph Carhart to think about this amazing project was a celebrated Green-Wood shrine, the ornate memorial marking Henry Chadwick’s grave, where baseballs are to this day left behind by unknown admirers, more than a century after the Hall of Fame writer’s death. The stone may tell his story, but it is the ball that tells ours.
The game we love is about the bat, but mostly it’s about the ball, that ancient symbol of life’s journey from birth to death and over again, without beginning or end. Containing endless circles within circles, the ball is about a dangerous voyage, mirrored on the baseball field where a hero’s quest for glory begins at home: hoping, after overcoming perils between the safe bays of the open seas, to return home … and then venture out again. The destination matters but it is the journey that is paramount.
That’s what baseball is about, I say, though of course it is so much beyond, supplying legends of demigods and epic feats, and a landscape of free-floating memory that connects us with others who love the game, and even with our former or future selves — recalling for the old what it meant to be young, and shining a light for children on what it may mean to grow up.
So if that’s what baseball is about, what is this strangely moving book about? It’s about baseball, sure, and it’s about those men who played it so well that their likenesses are enshrined on plaques at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. And it’s about parks — not only stadiums where baseball was played but also the parks where its departed worthies reside. The author loves cemeteries as if they were parks, which of course they were when baseball began: rural reposes — rus in urbe — in the bustling cities of industrial America, places for contemplation and connection, where the dead might be revered and the children might play.
But what about the many living Hall of Famers who posed with The Hall Ball, their playing days long behind them yet still a vital part of who they are, not merely who they had been? Like their counterparts under the sod, they are eternally players in The Great Game, even if this is seldom or never a conscious thought.
Players. That standard baseball term, on which we seldom reflect, derives from the theater, that simulacrum of real life to which Ralph Carhart has devoted his professional life. Practitioners of the baseball arts were thus named because they were regarded as entertainers, and they endured all the scorn and suspicion that upstanding members of society would heap on those who played for a living.
Baseball and theater are his two loves, the author declares, apart from family; but they are truly one. Baseball is theater with an unscripted outcome … unlike the drama crafted by the playwright, or life itself, where the ending is known.
I think that I have had my own strange, seemingly obsessive “Hall Ball experience,” and many of you who will read and love this book will have had it too. The quest described here may at first seem like flagpole sitting — why do it? because no one else has thought to — but at the end I completely understood it: all those who care deeply about some one thing — beyond how they might feel about some one or more persons — will understand it, too. The love of an idea can be a passionate if lonely feeling, but a lucky few of us do get to share that unrequited love in print.
