BALTIMORE — Early each weekday morning, a 47-year-old man with graying hair takes a timecard and punches in at his job. He retreats to a room for a moment and emerges wearing a blue-gray uniform whose shirt bears his stitched surname: Tinker. The man seizes the tools of his trade and gets to work.

In some respects, Christopher Tinker’s routine as an automobile mechanic is similar to the one followed a century ago by his great-grandfather Joe Tinker, the Chicago Cubs shortstop who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1946.

Each had to master the details of a physical craft and be precise in his measurements, whether gauging the speed of a fastball or calibrating the front-end alignment of a car. Indeed, as Christopher Tinker bends over engines, rotates wrenches and kicks tires, he can almost feel his ancestor’s presence. Particularly because there, on Tinker’s left forearm, is a tattoo of the 1911 baseball card of his great-grandfather, who is best remembered for being part of a famous baseball roll call: Tinker to Evers to Chance.

Those three made up the double-play combination immortalized in a poem — “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” — that was written in 1910 by the New York Evening Mail columnist Franklin Pierce Adams in homage to their infield prowess.