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 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.