Brian Rhodes: The Wizard of Falcon Park

As fans start to file into Falcon Park at 5:30 PM, they can catch a glimpse of Brian Rhodes and his groundskeeping crew. Wearing a weathered Doubledays batting practice cap and dark wrap-around sunglasses, Brian - or "Rhodesie" as he's known around the ballpark - can be seen walking on the warning track while the visiting team wraps up batting practice.
To the casual fan, Brian's job might appear to be one of the easiest ones in the stadium: mow the grass, line the field, hose it down and then do it all over again the next day.
But it's far from it.
"There's a lot more that goes into it during the day that I didn't realize coming in and I don't think a lot of people realize."
Starting at 6:30 AM and staying after the last pitch has been thrown, Brian's job at Falcon Park is to keep the field in pristine condition. That means countless walk-throughs, fertilizing, trimming, digging, and passing the outfield with his mower more times than you can count on both hands.
From breaking apart and rebuilding the clay around home plate to preparing for the inevitable beating that the field will take during batting practice, Brian's work on the field runs deeper than what is seen during game time.
But Brian wasn't always the landscaping guru that he is today. With zero landscaping experience and only his big aspirations, he was hired as the head groundskeeper at Falcon Park in 2012. It was a huge jump for Brian, who had only been hired by the City of Auburn three years prior.
As with all city workers, Brian had to start from the bottom of the totem pole. That meant starting at the Auburn landfill and working his way up the ranks.
"It was around a year or a year and a half later I was working with Ricky Smith painting street signs. I went to Soule Cemetery and worked with Jimmy Buschman and it was shortly after that when I came to work here at Falcon Park."
It was then that Brian had to take a crash course in groundskeeping. With very little training and the previous Falcon Park groundskeeper leaving soon after he was hired, Brian was fortunate enough to be able to learn from John Stewart at the Syracuse Chiefs right as he was getting his feet wet on the grass at Leo Pinckney Field.
Stewart would teach Brian the ins and outs of the art of groundskeeping. Coincidentally, both Steward and Brian owned the same mower, so Stewart would do cuts on the field at NBT Bank Stadium and then take him up to the upper deck to show him how they would look from the stands.
And from there, Brian began doing his first designs in the outfield of Falcon Park.
From his very first bullseye design to a majestic "sunburst" pattern, Brian began regularly manipulating the outfield grass with his mower to create stunning designs to be viewed from behind home plate.
While his designs have mostly been to amaze the fans at Falcon Park, an opportunity arose early this summer to be able to do more with his mower than just create a cool pattern.
Minor League Baseball, the New York-Penn League, and Auburn, NY lost someone amazing on June 21, 2018.
Charlie Wride, New York-Penn League historian since 1998 and a lifelong resident of Auburn, passed away after recent struggles with his health. Charlie's passing not only ended his extensive career in the game since 1964, but also ended the lifelong friendships he created and maintained on the way.
Loved throughout Auburn and especially Falcon Park - where Wride was the public address announcer for the Auburn Astros in 1996 and then the Doubledays until 2005 - Brian quickly began thinking of ways how he could memorialize such a monumental community figure.
One one the most highly regarded groundskeepers in the league and winner of the Groundskeeper of the Year Award in 2015, Rhodes began to think how he could use his canvas of Leo Pinckney Field to create a memorial fit for a legend.
Inevitably, the only way to truly celebrate the life of Charlie Wride was on a baseball field. Serving as Director of Auburn Community Baseball from 1964-74 and then Vice President from 1975-95 while also serving as League Historian since 1998, baseball wasn't just a part of Charlie's life - it was his life.
So when Brian was thinking of a field design in his honor, a baseball was the way to go.
The only question was: how?
Like anything, the construction of Charlie Wride's field memorial started with an idea. And like most large scale projects, this one took a lot of time and thought to plan out.
"I thought about it a lot. I knew how I was going to do the circle but how I was going to do the stitches and make it symmetrical was going to be a challenge," said Brian. "So I thought about it and thought about it and finally it hit me."
So Brian grabbed some string, nails, and a measuring wheel and got to work.
Mapping out the design took hours despite the relatively quick cut job with his mower. But once complete, the field design could be easily replicated on a smaller scale using a foam board, a thumb tack, a sharpie, a ruler, and a piece of string.

 

With "CHARLIE" painted behind home plate in bold letters with red, white, and blue accents, Brian's tribute to the great Charlie Wride was complete.
It's not only the fans that appreciate the work that Brian puts into his field. Even after players have been promoted to Single-A Hagerstown or Class-A Advanced Potomac, players still have rave reviews over the work that Brian put into his field. But when the lights go off in the outfield of Falcon Park, it really is just another day's work.
"It's rewarding to hear that we're doing a good job but the way I look at it is that I'm doing my job - I'm doing what I'm supposed to do," Brian says. "The city, for almost 10 years, has been paying me every two weeks and all they expect from me is to do my best so that's what I do."
So next time you see Brian Rhodes on the warning track before first pitch, know that there's so much more to his job than just mowing grass.