When the sun rose over the O’Connell Center on Monday morning, the infield grass at McKethan Stadium was just starting to look presentable. It was 7:52 a.m., and when it finally peeked over the dome, UF student Kaleb Lewis had to pause. He couldn’t risk messing up his masterpiece by succumbing to the glare.
Lewis, a plant science major specializing in turf management, had already spent more than half an hour trimming the infield lawn, shaving in line after line, row after row to achieve an illusion that looks different depending on where you’re standing.
Around the same time, UF director of sports turf Jason Smith was starting the same process in the outfield. He was tattooing a pattern into the grass.
You’ve seen these patterns. They’re ubiquitous in college baseball, minor league baseball, the MLB and even on football fields. And while they vary in intensity — from a standard checkerboard to a full-blown American flag and beyond — the question of how they’re created receives little attention.
As a fan, you don’t think about it. You show up to a baseball game and there they are, lines in the grass. You’d probably only notice them if they were missing. But if you’ve ever wondered how groundskeepers doodle designs into the ground without paint, water or dirt, well, this is for you.
At McKethan Stadium, drawing in designs is overseen by Todd Campbell, UF’s assistant turf coordinator. He said that at Florida, designs start with meetings between groundskeepers, who draw sketches on paper, clay or warning-track dirt. He said that while the final product is usually appealing, there are problems that often come up.
When Smith started trimming the outfield on Monday, for example, he had to stop and go tinker with the five-blade “fairway unit” mower, which resembles a golf ball collection vehicle at a driving range. One of the blades wasn’t working.
“If you run over a bolt or even a quarter,” Campbell said, “that’ll throw the whole thing off.”
While Smith was fixing his issue, Lewis was busy continuing to shave rows into the infield. He nudged his single-blade push mower up and down the rows multiple times, achieving an effect Campbell called “burning in.”
Basically, the more times a row is mowed, the more pronounced the slant of the grass gets, and the more contrast there is in a pattern. Campbell added that they’ll mow the same rows multiple times per day over multiple days when they really want to show off.
And the mowers they use aren’t average at-home mowers. Those usually have a blade that rotates in a circle, chopping off the top of the grass and not doing much else. The mowers used on turf, meanwhile, have three important components.
Starting at the front of the mower, there’s a metal device that looks sort of like a screw, except it’s not twisted. Its job is to shape the grass into miniature rows, much like your barber aligns your hair before cutting it. This ensures an even trim.
Then there’s the blade. Imagine a paint roller made of sharp silver wires.
Finally, there’s the cylinder. The key to making patterns.
The cylinder is a smooth metal rod located behind the blade. It bends the grass in whatever direction the mower is moving, so if you keep going back and forth across the infield, for example, you’ll end up with one row of grass pointing south, the next one pointing north, then south, and so-on.
So how does this come together to create patterns? After all, if you tear out chunks of grass from opposing rows, they’re still going to be the same color. Why does a slight slant affect how we see the field?
It has to do with shadows.
Let’s say you’re sitting behind home plate and the sun is behind you. The rows that were mowed toward you will be darker because the light will cast a shadow on them. The rows that were mowed away from you will look lighter because the grass will reflect the light.
It’s all an illusion that’s completely relative. If you move from behind home plate to center field, the rows that appeared dark in your old seat would look light.
As Lewis continued his back-and-forth trot, another important part of the process became apparent. He was keeping perfectly steady to form perfectly straight lines without any guidance, something Campbell said just comes with practice.
“You’re gonna wanna be a laser,” he said.
Of course mowing the grass isn’t the only thing Campbell and his staff -- which consists of four people -- do.
They also water the clay. At this time of year, they do that 4-5 times a day.
They also fertilize, using about 9,000 pounds of nitrogen -- the equivalent of 30 300-pound football players -- per year.
They also “tamp,” which is the process of slamming the ground -- mostly the batter’s box -- with a square on a stick to flatten and repair the dirt.
But through all of that, including the mowing, there’s a constant: their work is always quickly destroyed.
Players tear up the clay with their cleats while the sun dries it out. Runners poke holes in the grass -- which eventually outgrows its patterns -- when they run up the baselines. Chalk batter’s boxes and foul lines are almost immediately reduced to indecipherable patches of white dust on orange dirt. And according to Campbell, the most crushing destruction results because the team is unpredictable.
“It can get extremely frustrating for me,” he added. “You can get discouraged.”
That’s why he makes decisions every day to balance the frustrating nature of a job where everything you create gets ruined with the desire to make everything on the field look its best.
As an example, he points to Smith on the riding mower. Smith is moving at 1-3 miles per hour up and down the field. The mower can move faster, but if he did, the quality wouldn’t be as good. For now, they have time to take it slow.
But sometimes, when there’s a 7 p.m. game one day and a noon game the next, that’s not an option.
The same compromise applies to shaving patterns into the grass. Elaborate designs are nice to look at, but they take time. Time that the grounds crew sometimes doesn’t have.
“You’ve gotta find that happy medium,” Campbell said, “and it’s tough.”
Contact Ethan Bauer at ebauer@alligator.org or follow him on Twitter @ebaueri.
Kaleb Lewis mows the infield at McKethan Stadium on Monday, April 17, 2017.
