Chavez Ravine's blades of glory

There are some things you never forget. Your first kiss. Your first fish.

I'll never forget the February day, just two months ago, when I took a peek at what I expected to be the vivid greenscape of Dodger Stadium and discovered instead a giant sandbox, 330 feet down the lines, 400 feet to center.

It was like catching Grandma in the arms of the postman, wrong on levels you didn't even know existed. Major league fields are supposed to be the sort of lush summer glens that inspire men to craft weepy movies about their fathers. The Dodgers in particular have always had perhaps the finest field of dreams in all baseball. In a Sports Illustrated survey, players named it their favorite playing surface.

Walt Whitman once dubbed grass "the handkerchief of the Lord," and you could almost imagine the great American poet roaming center field here, glove at his hip. I suspect he would have vacuumed up everything hit his way in Dodger Stadium. As with Mays and Mantle, no fly ball would have ever bruised the earth.

But on this perfect February morning -- a day that cried out for picnics and marriage proposals -- Dodger Stadium was a lunar landscape, not a single blade of grass in sight. You call this a ball yard?

Eric Hansen is the head groundskeeper, a former Air Force man from Texas who will discuss almost anything you want, one of the calmest people in the Dodgers' organization.

Turns out Hansen is the one who's painted over the Picasso. Under his guidance, crews have peeled up all that beautiful turf. It looks to be the sort of thing you'd do in revenge, out of spite and anger.

But it's something the Dodgers do routinely every four or five years, beginning with a two-week makeover in late January, followed by careful nurturing over the next two months, just before fans show up for the April opener. They pull up the old carpet and put in the new. Fans never witness the upheaval; we just swoon over the finished product.

As with all big spring yard projects, there are a hundred issues for Hansen, not the least of which is the unpredictable weather and inopportune rains.

"I don't get too worried," says Hansen, who has been with the Dodgers for 10 years and worked at the Toronto Blue Jays' spring training complex before that. "I've done it so many times."

As with any major yard project, it takes different skill sets, big crews and lots of heavy lifting. A lot of the real work goes on beneath the surface.

Step 1: The old grass comes out, along with about 2 inches of roots, seed and soil (dirt infield areas are left intact).

Step 2: New sand is brought in, about 400 tons, to replace most of the discarded stuff.

Step 3: Gypsum, the double-malt scotch of Southland lawns, is added to loosen the soil and keep it from compacting.

Step 4: The new and existing material are blended together to a depth of 6 or so inches, but not deep enough to disturb the Byzantine system of pipes, pumps and other irrigation devices beneath the field.

Step 5: Using laser guides, contractors smooth the field nearly flat, in preparation for the sod.

Step 6: A 12-man crew from West Coast Turf brings in 100,000 square feet of sod, in 42-inch widths nearly three times as wide as the turf you get at the corner nursery. Over a two-day period, they press and caress this new field into place, as if smoothing on a Band-Aid.

This is where the remake gets interesting.

Think of the Dodger Stadium turf as two crops, spring and summer. The original grass, a Bermuda hybrid, is grown in Palm Desert, where the root systems are nurtured in sandy soil similar to that of the stadium in Chavez Ravine.

The growers then overseed the Bermuda with rye, the leafy, wide-bladed cool-weather grass common in northern climes. This rich, deep-green grass does better in the early months of the baseball season, taking dominance as the Bermuda lies low. By June and July, the rye begins to give way to the Bermuda grass, which better tolerates crushing heat.