Keeping the Grounds
The fans bring in an eagerness for the first pitch as they settle into their seats and thumb through a fresh copy of the game program. The players have finished wrapping their bats in athletic tape are emerging from the dugout to stretch and get ready for the game. For those who spend long days and nights at the ballpark, it's one of the times of night that never gets old. That is no truer for anyone at the ballpark than it is for 27-year-old head groundskeeper Brian Soukup.
"[It's] when I'm at my happiest," said Soukup. "Everything is perfect, the stands are starting to fill up, the lines are painted, the grass is good, the dirt is good, and I'm just out there touching it up with water. It's the culmination of all the work that nobody sees."
There is, indeed, a lot of work that nobody sees. There are few, if any, that spend more time at the ballpark than Soukup and his full-time crew of Kevin Asay, Ryan Heiner and Drew Scarfo. "Those guys are the backbone of what we do. In Triple-A, it's the detail work that can take a field from good to great and those guys are the best."
In a typical 14-hour game day, the grounds crew will do everything from mow the grass, pack the bullpen dirt, touch up the infield dirt, tidy up the home plate area, clean and drag the warning track in the outfield and hand water any dry spots on the field. That's all before batting practice in the late afternoon. After batting practice, the crew just about repeats those steps to get the field ready for play.
When the team is on the road, the days are shorter but the work becomes even more important.
"That's when we do the real work," Soukup said. "We re-slope and re-pack around the plate, get them back to perfect. We edge, spray and fertilize the field, and do all the touching up that needs to be done now that we have time to do that [with the team on the road]."
Another thing that is usually done while the team is on the road is mowing patterns into the infield and outfield grass. For the 2011 Triple-A All-Star Game, the outfield and infield grass had star patterns in it with an oversized Salt Lake Bees logo in centerfield. While it's possible to mow those unique patterns literally into the grass, most groundskeepers at this level and above usually use a trick instead.
"Now that the cat is out of the bag, Jared [Olson], the Bees groundskeeper from last year, cheated," Soukup says, laughing. Olson is now the manager of grounds at the new Marlins Park for Major League Baseball's Miami Marlins.
"He painted those logos on the grass," Soukup said. "All those dark green stars and the SL logo in centerfield was paint. It's better for the grass. It's easier and quicker, because to get the pattern in, you're mowing the grass a bunch of different directions and trying to make the grass lay over. You want to see the logo in it and that inherently is not good for grass so the painting is what I would have done too."
So while some groundskeepers like to mow those patterns into the grass, the field's primary purpose is not necessarily to look good. The primary purpose of the field is to provide a safe playing surface for the players to play on.
"You see all those people who do crazy patterns," Soukup said. "I had that phase and I'm out of it now. At this level, everything is about playability so we try to do a pattern [where] every stripe is going toward each position player. So when the ball is rolling to them, they don't have to worry about the ball hitting a different stripe and snaking away."
One of the life lessons that a groundskeeper must learn early is how to let go of the things he can't control. Certainly when a job revolves around something so dependent on the weather, this can be tough.
"I've been doing this for eight years and you're constantly fighting Mother Nature and begging every day that it's going to cooperate," said Soukup. "Rain is always an issue, but it's the dry heat here that keeps me up at night. It's very difficult to keep a cool-season grass looking good and healthy, and keeping the clay surfaces from drying out when it's 100 degrees, sunny and 20 percent humidity. But, we adapt and do the best we can."
A former intern with Philadelphia, Soukup celebrated on the field when the Phillies clinched a playoff berth in 2007. Those are the times that make all the hard work worth it.
"Like any other job, people don't see everything that goes on," Soukup said. "[People] just think it's grass you mow and dirt you rake. Grounds keeping has come such a long way. Watch Major League or Bull Durham and then try to find a minor league field that looks as bad as those fields did 20 years ago. I stopped trying to explain this job to people years ago, but it truly has become a science, an art form, and I hope the players and fans can enjoy it."