Fields of green: Mild winter, no games aid ballpark grass

Nicole Sherry poked some holes in the turf at Camden Yards, cut the grass and then left the ballpark about the same time the Baltimore Orioles should have been wrapping up their season opener.

“What a beautiful day it would have been for a ballgame,” said Sherry, the head groundskeeper for the Orioles. “It was kind of surreal because I was thinking, ‘Technically, this is opening day.’”

Camden Yards was all green and would have been ready for what was going to be Major League Baseball’s earliest start, March 26. Then the season was put on hold indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic.

A mild winter was beneficial to Oriole Park, and many other ballparks often battered by brutally cold temperatures, snow and ice. Now the grass has even longer to grow, get greener and strengthen before there will be any games.

A decade into the Minnesota Twins playing home games outside, the Target Field natural turf was in really good shape after an earlier-than-usual thaw.

“There was no rot or disease or anything that we could see that had damaged anything,” said Matt Hoy, the team’s senior vice president of operations. “When you look at it from up in the upper level and look down at the field, it looked gorgeous.”

When preparing for what would have been their home opener Thursday, the Twins split their grounds crew into two groups, working at different times, to maximize social distancing on the field.

“Somebody will be there pretty much every day dealing with the grass and making sure that we’ll be ready to go at a moment’s notice, or when players are here, they’ll be able to go out and do long toss on the field, should they need it,” Hoy said.

Roger Bossard, in his 54th season as a groundskeeper with the White Sox, usually returns from...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Fields-of-green-Mild-winter-no-games-aid-15179124.php