Leaving it all on the field ...Page 2 of 4 -- “I give the grounds crew a lot of credit for doing what they can in this old park,” says one Red Sox player. “They do miracles with it,” he adds. “But it’s still one of the hardest parks in the majors to play in. The infield isn’t flat. It’s crowned, for drainage. There are soft spots and hard spots. Lots of unpredictable hops and things. It’s pretty widely known among players as probably the hardest infield to play in in the American League. You can’t take as many risks.”
(Of course, the grounds crew can offer a little home field advantage, too. With sinker ball/ground ball pitcher Derek Lowe scheduled to go this night, the grass was a little higher and the dirt in front of home plate a bit thicker and looser than normal. “Mower must have been broken,” grins one crew member.) “There are certainly more challenges,” Mellor says of the 92 year-old facility. Fenway is the only park in the majors, for instance, without an automated irrigation system. The crew has to do a lot more watering by hand. The Green Monster creates challenges too. It acts like a giant heat mirror, reflecting sun down on left field and left center, where the grass can be 5-7 degrees warmer than the parts of the field that stay in shade. Those areas need much more watering. The shady areas in the infield, some of which get practically no sun all winter, can have solid frost just a few inches below the surface well into May. “The crew takes extra pride in working on all that,” Mellor says. For a crew of mostly 20-somethings who grew up in the Boston area, it’s not hard to figure out where that pride comes from. “Being a Red Sox fan my whole life, it’s a really unbelievable experience taking care of someplace this famous, this historic,” says Andrew Walsh, a student in the UMass agronomy/turf management program who interned on the grounds crew this summer. This year 13 interns from agronomy/soil science programs at colleges across the country worked on the crew. As he brushes the pitching mound before the game, slowly and gently grooming the surface like it was a baby’s skin, he adds “My first day, it was like ‘Wow! I’m going to walk out on the field at Fenway Park!’” (A word on the Fenway “skin”. It’s a special mix of sand, silt, and clay. “The red part is basically the same stuff as kitty litter, baked clay, ground up fine” Mellor says. It’s red because that’s the color that team owner John Henry wants it. “We have it colored that way at the factory.”) “Taking care of the field is like taking care of newborn baby,” says Steve Padovani, who has been with the crew for five years, as he hunches on hands and knees and uses a putty knife to perfectly smooth the dirt around first base prior to a game. “The place needs a lot of tender loving care.” Continued... |
