Phil Nuxhall is traipsing through trees and bushes he can't identify in search of a third baseman whom he could, if only the headstone would show itself. It's section 125 of Spring Grove Cemetery, which means that Heinie Groh is in there somewhere. For our purposes, it's perhaps best that Nuxhall couldn't locate the grave of the long-lasting, much-admired infielder who wielded the bottle-shaped bat in the Reds' fix-stained championship season of 1919. Cemeteries are all about the unseen. Who knows what stories are buried beneath the vast horticulture of Spring Grove?

Nuxhall knows better than most, having made it his business to. The Ol' Left-hander's son, who professes to possess none of his family's athletic ability -- "even my mom can throw," he says -- recently retired from 30 years as a speech pathologist at a Bridgetown elementary school, which means that he can now devote himself full-time to that which has obsessed him for about eight years. In the beginning, he came to Spring Grove with a group of sculpture enthusiasts to chronicle the original art on the premises. When that was done, he couldn't leave.

"It was some power that took over me. I just took it upon myself to go around documenting anything of interest in the cemetery," he said. "Every time I come, I find something."

Ultimately, Nuxhall parlayed his passion into a job as Spring Grove's first historian, which means he can take you around to the various politicos, generals (there are 40 of them on site from the Civil War alone, including those from the family of the Fighting McCooks), city founders, commercial titans and professional ballplayers. If you wished, he could lead you on a sightseeing circuit of department store owners, another of Cincinnati mayors, and even a jaunty rundown of the city's leading brewers.

Today, however, we are doing the sports tour, which will be available to the public once Nuxhall can pin down Groh and other local figures of mostly German descent. When the graves are found, there is typically nothing remarkable about them except for the name and all that preceded interment.

Long John Reilly, for instance, is memorialized merely with a stone that bears his name, including the Long, and a Masonic emblem. It will require Nuxhall or your own devices to learn that Reilly, whose colorful Cincinnati career embraced the 1880s, claimed to be the first first baseman to play wide of the bag. In addition to twice leading the American Association -- a major league at the time -- in home runs and once stealing 82 bases, he was also quite accomplished as a commercial artist.

Harder to find, and older yet, is Charles "Bushel Basket" Gould, Cincinnati's first professional ballplayer. The only local man on the original 1869 Red Stockings, Gould was also Cincinnati's first manager in the National League. Doomed by his lack of success in that capacity, he wandered about the city for the rest of his days, working briefly as a streetcar conductor, among other things. His death was scarcely noted until, decades later, Warren Giles, the National League president and former Reds executive, found Gould's unmarked grave under a shady fir tree and erected a monument on the spot.

Another cooling fir marks the plot of Miller Huggins, the little second baseman and mighty manager of the Babe Ruth Yankees. Ruth's teammate, broadcasting legend Waite Hoyt, sits nobly on a Spring Grove hillside.

Hoyt worked for the Cincinnati station founded by Powel Crosley, who also owned the Reds for a while and eventually made his way to a prominent corner in the nation's largest private, non-profit cemetery. Francis Dale, another chief executive for hometown baseball, is buried just down the street. It's hard, in fact, to think of a Reds owner who isn't or won't be laid to rest at Spring Grove.

The baseball connections meander on through a collection of hardly known players, spinning off into the hallowed but curious ground of those with singular historical connotations. For instance, in a spot so remote that Nuxhall isn't even sure where to look, lies the inimitable Charles Grant.

The son of a Cincinnati horse trainer, Grant played a fine second base for the black Chicago Giants, and also for a team of hotel employees in Hot Springs, Ark., where he worked as a bellhop. There, he was discovered by Baltimore Orioles manager John McGraw, who was struck by inspiration as he viewed a wall map in the hotel lobby. Noting a creek named Tokohoma, and knowing that no black players would be welcomed into the major leagues at the turn of the century, McGraw offered Grant an infield position as Charlie Tokohoma, a Cherokee Indian. Grant went so far as to place feathers in his hair and would have opened the season in Baltimore if Charlie Comiskey of the White Sox hadn't found him out.

Then there's Ren Mulford, the Cincinnati sportswriter who was the first to use the term "fan" in print. And Frank Bancroft, the longtime Reds business manager who masterminded the first ballpark wedding, developed Cincinnati's Opening Day tradition and introduced baseball to Cuba.

Finally -- and given his entrée into Spring Grove, Nuxhall is particularly pleased with this one -- there is the easily found gravesite of noted sculptor Nathan Baker, who had nothing to do with the national pastime except for fashioning a model of a player in the act of throwing a ball. The interesting part is that the work was completed six years before Abner Doubleday was supposed to have invented the game.

http://www.cincypost.com/2003/06/24/lonnie06-24-2003.html