SF Giants' Pitch Ready for Opening Home Exhibition Game Against Oakland 'A's!

It may be April Fools Day, but preparing the Giants' pitch at the AT &T Park has been no joke.

Tonight sees the Giants testing it out for the first time in an exhibition game against the Oakland Athletics.

And for award-winning Head Groundskeeper, Greg Elliott, it marks the culmination of six weeks of intensive labour and innovative changes...see previous blogs

In fact, the pitch has been almost ready for the last two weeks. In mid-March, Greg surveyed his handiwork and said, 'We could play baseball now. We are fine tuning.'

'We are 85 per cent ready for opening day. That doesn't mean we couldn't play. We could play a game out here tomorrow but it wouldn't be to our standards,' he said. 'Our standards' meaning nothing less than perfection, of course.


One of the new features is a different mix of grass, chosen for ability to withstand wear and tear, recuperate quickly and, not least, colour.

Underfoot, it needs to be spongy and springy, said Greg testing it out. To his delight the grass had grown in well and the colours were 'coming along.'

What greeted his eye at that moment was the ryegrass, the new incumbent being a Bermuda that is still dormant.

He dropped to the ground enthusiastically and peered into a strategic gap in the grass. There, poking through the sandy-coloured soil, were tiny shoots of Bermuda Tifway 11, displaying small spreading sprouts.

'We are starting to get positive growth, it's very exciting! It's loving the sun!' he said.

The tricky part to build is the pitcher's mound. This mound is in only it's second season of being built with six specially-engineered circular steel pallets that hold compacted soil for firmness. Their faint outline could be seen below the topsoil.

That day, Greg wanted more moisture in the mound. 'Moisture is the key to everything we do,' he said, a fine balancing act between too much and too little. Helping this is a totally new feature of moisture sensors. Three have been placed in the grass to measure moisture levels, ground temperature, salinity and acidity.

'It's a really cool project, technically speaking,' said Greg, adding 'Who knows, we could do it in the soil in the future.'

An accurate record of water levels also means less water being used, saving both on the environment and the bills. Being green is 'really big for us,' he said of the Giants' organization. 'There is no reason to have any excess out there and many reasons to take care especially of our resources.'

There was good news about the infield. It was 95 per cent ready in Greg's estimation. The test, and he  knelt down to demonstrate, is to put a small, sharp-ended key into the clay and twist. If the key turns smoothly, all is well, but if it turns up chunks of soil, then more work is needed.

Underfoot, the infield must give a 'cork-like feeling, springy and firm.' His infield responds just the way he likes it! He is going to continue giving it a little more conditioner, and remove a few tiny 'rocks'.

Rocks?

'People misunderstand and panic when I say 'rocks'! he said hastily. 'It's gravel, really.' He caught sight of a 'rock', bent down, picked it up and held it out in the palm of his hand.

Reassuringly, the 'rocks' that instill fear of a ball veering off course are bits of gravel smaller than one-quarter of an inch, part of the normal make-up of soil. Fine tuning indeed!

Home plate was more of a problem. 'We weren't happy with home plate, so we turned it over to dry it a bit more. Today was a good day. We have got the weather for us to do that,' he commented.

His instinct had served him well. It was hot in the empty stadium at 1 pm, and by the end of the day television weather reports were showing a high of 71 degrees, the highest temperature so far this year.

What was the problem with home plate? The 'tarp' had been down for a long time and with the El Nino spring producing well-fulls of water, it was 'dry on top and squishy beneath.' The field would have suffered too, but for Greg's care of the mix of soil and sand, and tilling to greater depth.

With innovations that Greg, the Giants and fans alike hope will make it one of the best baseball pitches in the country, he paid tribute to the enormous support given to him by the Giants' organization and particularly his boss, Jorge Costa, Senior Vice President, Ballpark Operations.

Now the day of testing is here.

'We call it Ground Hog Day when the team's in town!' he said, by which he meant that there are little variations to the daily maintenance 'but the end result is the same.'

In a few hours, the Giants will be playing against the Oakland 'A's. They play their opening game of the season away to the Houston Astros on Monday, which leaves Greg a few more days for final tweaking. Then the Orange and Black onslaught of the 2010 season begins at home next Friday against the Atlanta Braves and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Greg and his pitch will be ready!

Preparing the SF Giants Pitch for the 2010 Season - Part 2

Greg Elliott is the Giant's Unseen Pitcher, a man charged with producing a perfect pitch before the baseball season has even begun and without ever throwing a ball...see previous blog 


For the Head Groundskeeper of the San Francisco Giants baseball team, the most complex part of pitch construction is the pitcher's mound.

A carefully calibrated centre-piece that can hinder or enhance a pitcher, this season the Giants' mound will bear the imprint of the likes of Cy Young Award twice-winner Tim Lincecum, whose skills have catapulted him into a two-year, $23 million contract, Barry Zito, Jonathan Sanchez, Matt Cain and Madison Bumgarner.

Aware of the need to achieve both a firm foundation and softer topping, last season Greg instituted a new design. This involves six specially-engineered circular steel pallets - similar to those pictured above. The pallets, like giant trays, hold about a four-inch depth of solid, undisturbed soil.

The pallets were lifted out of the ground at the end of last season and stored under the bleachers until ready for use again. Then, like a circular jigsaw, they are slotted together and laid over the cement pad that forms the base of the mound.

'They should create a more consistent pitching surface for the pitchers - it's all about consistency,' said Greg, using the 'C' word that is one of his twin themes, playability being the other.

His next task is to shape the mound using infield clay for a lighter topping, and allowing air and water into the surface soil.

He literally inches his way over and round the precious mound, making sure it is 18 ft in diameter, rises to a plateau measuring 5 ft by 3ft and 10 inches above home plate, slopes gently down at one inch per foot, and has the centre edge of the players' rubber exactly 60 ft 6 in from the rear point of home plate.

'Building a pitcher's mound is as much an art as it is a science,' says Baseball Almanac on www.baseball-almanac.com.

'We've been able to embrace both aspects, the artistic and scientific parts,' said Greg. Describing the artistic part as 'how you interpret it, check the shape and compaction,' he added, ''I think we've taken the technological aspect as far as we can and so the artistic part is up to us.

'It's more artistic than anything. You have to have a feel for it. There's no books on it, there's nothing really out there.'

Another job is to install the infield clay, also stored under the bleachers - pic left -and base lines at home plate, and level them.











Then there are the bull pens to build, both for the Giants and the visiting teams. Greg uses rectangular steel pallets of heavily compacted soil - pic above - for the Giants, and steel frames built with pieces each weighing one ton.

 pics show Greg constructing the visitors' bullpen last week after the grass has been laid

Two of his final remaining tasks are to nourish the field with 'earthworm castings', the waste of earthworms broken down - 'It helps to root the field in better,' he said, meaning that it helps with water flow as well as nutrient levels - and root out bugs.

'Then we're pretty much ready to go! We start hosting baseball games. That's when we get into our general maintenance,' he said.

With hardly time to draw breath, once the games start, Greg moves into high-gear care and repair.

When there is a game, he mows every day, irrigates lightly and daily as opposed to the alternative groundkeeping philosophy of 'deep and infrequent', fertilizes before each 'home stand', deals with pests, aerifys and top dresses, and manages the clay surfaces.

Has he ever been thrown a curve ball?

'Oh yes!' he said, throwing his head back in bemusement. 'There's always curve balls!!!'

Last season a rock jammed part of the irrigation system overnight. A puddle of unwelcome water greeted him in the morning in the left field, though fortunately it was during preparation time just after the soil had been laid. 'We just had to be patient and let it dry out,' he said.

During the season, the Giants' grounds are also open for community events including concerts. After one particular concert, he found he suddenly had to replace 18,000 square feet of sod, when he was hoping that only 6,000 square feet would be needed.

Concerts, especially combined with weather, are unpredictable. 'With concerts you don't know what you're going to get,' he said. Come what may, his role is to make sure that the players are unaware that anything has happened!

Then there is surface damage that Greg always has to be on his toes about, though 'that shouldn't be a problem if you're doing things right with your maintenance and if you have good grass,' he said. Basically, 'we can resod it and move on.'

The front of the mound and around home plate are treated as individual areas, and rain, especially during games, is always a concern. A polyvinyl field tarp of 170 square feet is pulled over the field for protection.

Over one inch of rain makes Greg nervous, though 'one-quarter of an inch in ten minutes could be just as devastating as one inch over a day,' he said. However, rain in San Francisco is 'not as large a concern here because of the weather patterns, but we are expecting a rainy spring with El Nino.'

Greg is entering his third season as Head Groundskeeper for the Giants. In all, he has been a Head Groundskeeper in baseball for 12 seasons. Before the Giants, he was in Minor League Baseball with the Lake County Captains in Eastlake, Ohio, where he also ran a consulting company to help local schools with sports fields for soccer, football, baseball and soft ball.

'That's why I know a lot about this,' he said. Before that, he was with the Cedar Rapids Kernels in Iowa, and in assistant roles in Indianapolis and Arizona.

He trained as an elementary school teacher at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. 'My mum was a teacher, so I thought that was the way to go, but in the long term it wasn't what I wanted to do,' he said.

Immediately after teaching, he became Director of Stadium Operations with the Toledo Mud Hens in Ohio, after which he went back to school to train in groundskeeping. And not just any school. Rather, Michigan State University where one of his professors was 'Yard Doctor' John 'Trey' Rogers, professor of turfgrass science, who helped Beijing in their preparation of the Olympic stadium.

A training that no doubt contributed to his outstanding achievements of being a four-time winner of the South Atlantic League Groundskeeper of the Year Award and twice Sports Turf Manager of the Year for Class A Minor League Baseball. Modestly reticent to talk about his achievements, he pays tribute to the Minor League teams that 'allowed me to grow as a professional.'

So what drew him to this career?

'Love of sport,' he said. 'My dad coached Little League Baseball for 25 years so I was always around a ballpark. And my first job was working for that Little League as a groundskeeper.'

Strange, how things come around, he mused.

His predictions for the Giants for this season?

'I'm not in the prediction business. I do know the expectations are high for the Giants, and they would like to get to the play-offs. They want a shot at that.

'Their expectations are high, which means my expectations are high.'

Preparing the SF Giants' Pitch for 2010 Season

Greg Elliott is the Unseen Pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. A man charged with producing a perfect pitch before the baseball season has even begun and without ever throwing a ball.

The skills and ambitions of players and the hopes of thousands of fans depend on his pitching skills, though his name will never appear on the jumbotron scoreboard.

For Greg is the Head Groundskeeper. A few weeks ago, he stood in time at the end of the winter season with its roller coaster of other sporting and community events that have ravaged the pitch, and the heraldic call of spring and the 2010 baseball season.

He has until April 1 to produce that perfect pitch for the first of the home Spring Training games, and just a few more days beyond that, while the Giants pit their skills in their opening game of the season away to the Houston Astros, to tweak it. Then on April 9, the gates of the AT&T ballpark will be flung open wide for the fans and the team will parade out for six days of home games, first against the Atlanta Braves and next, the Pittsburgh Pirates.

But in February, Greg gazed at bare soil and sand, a freshly-minted sprawling green lawn, and unblemished, skilfully constructed pitcher's mound, homeplate and infield yet a vision in his mind's eye.

A former elementary school teacher who retrained with a degree in Sports and Commercial Turfgrass Management, he is an award-winning groundskeeper and soil scientist looking for the best and utilizing the latest technologies. There are changes underfoot.

By mid-morning that day, with a tractor tilling the soil and skid steers flattening it, he was confidently proclaiming they were 'ahead of schedule.'

'There's a tight deadline to get the field in, but we have enough time to appropriately grow it,' he said.  'A 'tight deadline' - to be ready for a game - would be "we have a game next week!"' he said, as he supervised the team of workers in the stadium.

With or without baseball, Greg is a pitcher for all seasons. His winter season begins in October with disassembling part of the old pitch.

'At the end of the baseball season we remove the infield material - a clay loam soil -and remove the portable mounds and store these in the 'players' lot' under the Coke sign,' he said. The Coca-Cola sign being an iconic 80-foot wooden bottle high up on the far end of the stadium with viewing platforms and four slides, and which flashes with celebratory lights on a home run.

Then the stadium is prepared for community use and football games. This winter they hosted two games of the California Redwoods plus the college football Emerald Bowl. A massive 350 tons of sand was spread over the pitch. Not just any sand but a USGA (US Golf Association) 'spec' sand, and grass was rolled on top of it.

By the end of January, the pitch was gone in readiness for a stadium-shaking event when Greg and his team truly felt the earth move under their feet. Approximately 6,000 cubic yards of it.

The annual Supercross event, a stadium version of motocross, is a mud-fest. Plastic sheeting goes down over the entire field and for two days soil is trucked in to form a six-inch 'road base'.


Supercross chose the original soil ten years ago and it is stored in nearby Mission Bay every year and reused - pics of soil at Terry Francois Boulevard, Mission Bay

The set involves jumps and a different track design each time, and takes Supercross over a week to build.

Once the last vestiges of one of the most popular events on the social calendar have finally gone, the old sod layer of last season's pitch is removed and recycled. A company truck it away, put it through a grinder and sell it as premium top soil. Fans wishing to grow their flowers or seed a lawn with a souvenir bag of dirt trodden on by their heroes, need only buy!

Which leaves Greg to face a bare field and the prospect of FanFest, a pre-season opportunity for fans to roam freely around their beloved stadium, go where usually only the elite go, and collect player autographs.

A light covering of sand remains, and Greg stands in a stadium that resembles more of a military practice ground for Iraq and Afghanistan, and watches as thousands of pairs of fans' feet trample joyously over his denuded pitch.

Now winter has passed, the fun is over and it is time for the soil scientist to apply his knowledge with seriousness to help the team do what they and everyone wants them to do - win games.

'Playability and consistency' are his twin themes. 

Firstly he replaces the field, bringing in fresh soil and mixing it with the sand after FanFest. The soil needs to be tilled, and this year Greg is using 'farm discs', two rows of rotating metal discs that till down to a new depth of ten inches.

'That's why we're trying to go deeper with the tilling. Playability and consistency, that's what we want,' he said. He has to balance two aspects: compaction of the soil that will give a firm, stable foundation, and  enough space within the soil for the roots of the grass to flourish.

'It's one thing that makes my job hard,'  he said, referring to compaction. 'I need to relieve it. When you compact, air and water space is limited. You need a free-flowing soil, you need to let oxygen in.'

Once the field has been tilled, then laser technology is employed to level it to a degree of NASA-like accuracy. A rotating laser pole is held aloft that communicates to a receiver that in turn sends down information to a box plate. The box controls a blade that pushes and pulls the soil, and by the time it is finished the field is level to a staggering 0.2 inches per 100 ft.

Next, irrigation heads are replaced on the sprinklers - there are over 60 in the outfield and about 20 in the infield, and finding them is not always easy! - and then ground levelling is fine-tuned to an even more staggering accuracy of 0.1 inches for every 100 ft.

Now the field sits waiting for a spring coat of over 107,000 square feet of freshly-growing grass. And it's out with the old style, and in with the new. Abandoned, is a mix of Kentucky Blue Grass and Perennial Ryegrass.

'This season we're changing to an overseeded Bermuda Grass Tifway II with Perennial Ryegrass. This will handle wear a lot better. We hope it will make a large difference for us,' said Greg. The Bermuda will form a protective mesh over the ryegrass, which is a tough grass popular for sports fields in southern states, and should recuperate more quickly. And when the Bermuda goes dormant in cold temperatures, the ryegrass will complement it by remaining green all year.

Greg is hoping the Giants will flourish along with the grass!

With the field attended to, he will turn his attention to the pivotal points of a baseball pitch, the pitcher's mound, infield and bases, and the bullpens. For the next stage in the preparation of the Giants' pitch, see next blog.