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FENWAY PARK INSIDER
Leaving it all on the field ...A day in the life of the Fenway grounds crewEditor's note: This is the third in a periodic series of articles and photo galleries bringing you an inside look at the Red Sox and Fenway Park. For more, check out the rail on the right of this article or the “Fenway insider” portion of the Red Sox Nation Fan Zone section on our Red Sox index.
You know that moment when you walk up the ramp to your seats at Fenway and the whole special place comes into view? That wide immaculate green of the outfield grass, the crisp red dirt of the infield, the sharp white foul lines. No matter how many games you’ve been to, it’s that little boy/little girl moment of your first game all over again. Well, thank David Mellor, Charles Brunetti, and the grounds crew for keeping Fenway the picturesque park that it is. Everything at Fenway from the seats in is in the hands of the 35 guys (yeah, they all happen to be guys) who mow, sweep, water, rake, fertilize, paint, and in other ways keep this “lyric little bandbox” of a baseball park looking as pretty as it does. Mellor had tended Lambeau Field for the Packers, and baseball parks for the Angels, Brewers, and Giants, before coming here four years ago. “There is definitely a special aura because it’s Fenway,” he says. “I still get goosebumps lots of times when I walk on the field.” He grew up “a Red Sox fanatic” and was working toward a pro baseball career before a car accident wrecked his knee after high school. “I loved baseball, I loved mowing lawns, I loved science. What I do now is the next best thing to actually playing the game.” Mellor followed the legendary groundskeeper Joe Mooney and immediately made his mark, literally, with his artistry at mowing various patterns into the grass; the Red Sox logo, a jack-o-lantern, cool geometric patterns. They did an American flag after 9/11, the number 9 after Ted Williams died. “We have fun with the aesthetics,” he says. (The trick to “lawn art” is using a roller to bend different areas of the grass in different directions, so the pattern shows up because each section reflects light differently. OK Sox fans, now go try to put your favorite player’s number in your lawn at home! And using Bill Mueller, number 11, is cheating. Too easy.) But they have to change the pattern every several days, for the same reason the grounds crew does most of what they do at Fenway. “What comes first, always, is playability and safety,” Mellor says. Turns out that crushing the grass down in the same pattern all the time would affect how the ball rolls. So how they mow, how they rake the infield dirt (they call it “the skin”), what they use to paint the foul lines, the meticulousness with which they pick up any tiny pebble or stone that could cause a bad bounce ... a huge amount of effort goes into making Fenway play well along with making it look good. “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.” And a lot of just plain grunt work. And long hours. Work for the first shift begins at 6 or 7 a.m. and entails watering the infield and cleaning up from the night before. Ever see the mess the players leave behind in the dugout after a game? The crew cleans that up. After the maintenance people in the stands use blowers to clean up the mess from the fans, and the light-weight peanut shells blow out onto the field, the grounds crew has to clean them up too. Damage to the pads along the outfield walls that protect the players? Another grounds crew job. Damaged seats up in the stands? Call the grounds crew. And of course, there’s the tarp. “The tarp is the hardest part,” says assistant groundskeeper Charles Brunetti, a graduate of the Mississippi State turf management program working his first major league team. “It’s heavy, even when it’s not wet. It’s awkward. The longer it sits on the ground the more the ground pulls on it kind of like suction and it gets harder to roll up.” Brunetti sees the job much like that of a farmer, which he was on his family’s rice and beans farm in Louisiana growing up. “I was working way too much to watch baseball. Here, the long hours are the same. The work ethic is the same. And a lot of what we do is trying to make things grow.” (The pay isn’t much different than a farmhand either. The average crew member makes $8.25 an hour. Of course, they DO get to see a LOT of baseball!) During the day, the crew will fertilize the grass, mow, maybe roll in one of those funky patterns. Occasionally they spread tiny grains of ground-up rubber from old tires on the grass, which settle down into the soil and help protect the grass from wear and tear. Every few days they rake up the foul lines between home and the outfield and repaint them. They use a combination of paint, chalk, and water. The paint holds the chalk in place and keeps it from making a dusty mess during the game. The water makes the whole brew paintable. “It’s harder than a lot of fans would think,” says Joel Strautin, a recent UMass turf management grad. “I was awestruck the first couple weeks. I mean, I’ve been coming here since I was in diapers. It’s fun to put in the effort to make it look like what it was when I was a kid coming here. “But there’s a lot of work. Hauling out the batting cages and setting them up, carrying the hoses, mowing. The hours are long, and there’s a lot with the old field you wouldn’t have to do in a modern park. Still, the guys make it fun. The best part is the friendships.” The camaraderie is obvious during the crew’s dashes out onto the field at the bottom of the third, fifth, and seventh to drag a new smooth surface on the infield. (That’s one of the things Mellor does to improve the playability ... the crew drags the field three times per game, when the rules only require it be done once.) As the bottom of the inning begins, the grounds crew lines up in the runway they hang out in during the game, out along the right field stands about a hundred feet past first base. Then, as soon as the ump signals the final out, they race onto the field, two-man teams carrying the draggers, five or six others following with hand rakes to work the areas around the bases. (Believe it or not, there is a right and wrong way to drag the field. If the guys pulling the drags stand up straight it can leave a wavy pattern in the “skin”. Watch them the next time you’re at a game. If they’re doing it right, they’re bending over so the dragger lays flat as they pull it along behind them.) They race back in about one minute later (the record is 57 seconds), high fiving and out of breath, rating their performance. They hang their equipment back up and settle in to gossip and watch the game. A team. Excited, even though it’s their job and they do it every day, to be among the very few permitted to go out on the sacred territory between the lines at Fenway Park. Which they let me set foot on to perform a job I had never noticed in all the games I’ve been to. They let me paint the rubber. That’s right. Before each game they spray paint the pitching rubber and home plate. (Once and for all there is no such thing as “the black” on the edges of home plate…as in ”painting the black” with a pitch over the corner. The only painting of home is before the game with white paint.) The plate, of course, is totally sacred territory, totally off limits for a non-crew member. But they gave me the honor of painting the pitching rubber before a recent game. It was just a can of spray paint, straight out of the hardware store. Nothing special. But. Oh, how special it felt to be out there doing it. I worried, would Derek Lowe’s foot stick if I sprayed the paint on too thick? Oh the responsibility! Nope. Everything was fine. The Sox swept the Angels with a 4-3 win. The crowd roared, then filtered out. And before the players and coaches were finished high-fiving each other out on the field, the grounds crew was back out to finish their long day. Refill all those holes the players spikes dug into the batter’s boxes. Collect and store the bases. Smooth out the infield. Repaint the lines. Connect those clunky old sprinkler heads to the pipes in the outfield and water the lawn.
The work goes on for an hour after the game, well after the lights are out and the place is nearly dark. With another 17-hour day to follow tomorrow. Hard work. Long work. Grunt work. But, then, as the longest-serving (nine seasons) crew member Paul Manning puts it “You feel like you’re part of the history of the place. This is Fenway. I get paid to stand on the infield, to take care of the place, to watch every game. What more could a local kid want!” |
