Here’s an update on Ralph Carhart’s research into the mystery of Cristóbal Torriente’s burial. To recap: the great Cuban outfielder spent his final days as a tuberculosis victim sequestered in Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island in the East River. Torriente’s death certificate indicated that his body was claimed by the Cuban ballplayer Ramiro Ramírez, an old teammate of Torriente, and that he was buried in “City Cemetery”; this is crossed out and replaced with Calvary Cemetery in Queens, where fellow Hall of Famers Willie Keeler and Mickey Welch are also buried.

However, another old Cuban teammate of Torriente, Rogelio Crespo, told John Holway that “they draped a Cuban flag over his coffin, and a politician arranged to return the body to Havana,” where it was interred in the Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón with dozens of other Cuban baseball stars (Holway, Blackball Stars, p. 132).

There are other slight variants on this story: in one account, Torriente was originally buried in New York City, but that his body was disinterred at the instigation of one Colonel Jaime Mariné y Montes, and returned to Cuba. I’ve seen Mariné y Montes described both as Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s aide-de-camp and as the head of Cuba’s “Dirección General Nacional de Deportes.”

As I mentioned back in February, Ralph Carhart spoke with Sigfredo “Siggy” Barros, baseball writer for the Cuban newspaper Granma, who told him that the Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón has no record of Torriente being buried there. So there seemed to be more of a mystery about the final disposition of Torriente’s remains than many had realized.

Recently more information has emerged. Ralph told me in an email that he has checked with Calvary Cemetery, and it turns that they do have records of Torriente’s burial there. He died as a ward of the state, and was buried in a communal plot in Section 39, along with seventeen others from the late 1930s through the early 1950s. It is part of a large field of communal graves.

Ralph went on:

“Because his grave is a communal grave, it would take nothing less than a government action to open up the ground, identify and remove him from the tangle of other burials, and have his body shipped internationally. Calvary, which has accurate records dating back one hundred and fifty years, has no record whatsoever of this event taking place, an event that would likely have produced no small amount of paperwork.”

In other words, Calvary has a record of burying him, but no record of exhuming him, and Havana has no record of burying him. So the story of Torriente’s removal to Cuba seems quite unlikely on both ends, Havana and New York, and as things stand, it would seem safe to say that Torriente lies buried in Queens.

He is also evidently the only deceased member of the Hall of Fame whose grave remains unmarked. It may remain this way. “Because Torriente is buried in a communal grave,” Ralph points out, “he is not to be afforded a marker, an honor that none of the thousands of others buried in the field would share. This is a fairly standard rule amongst cemeteries.” Now, Sol White was also laid to rest in a communal grave, and he did recently receive a marker–but Ralph believes that was an unusual situation that is unlikely to be repeated. Torriente is likely to stay as he is, continuing to share his final place of rest with all the others who have been buried alongside him.