Taking Care of Playing Field Is the Groundskeepers’ Turf : Sports: The job can be a lot like yardwork, and some groundskeepers say that’s why they get no respect.

When the bright lights go on and the game begins, these professionals fade into the shadows. Unknown to fans, at times unappreciated by the stadium owners who employ them, they are the groundskeepers of professional sports--the people who prepare the fields the games are played on.

So when one of their number steps into the limelight, the groundskeepers cheer.

One such is George Toma, the groundskeeper for the Kansas City Royals and one of the most well-known and controversial of his profession.

“Groundskeepers are usually the dirt of the organization--they’re way down,” Toma says. He is sitting in his small, cluttered office behind the outfield of the Kansas City Royals’ stadium. “The owners of a lot of these clubs have a lot of money invested in their players. You find today that weight rooms look better than hotel lobbies,” he says. “And it seems that when it comes down to the playing field, where the game is being played, it stops. Nobody cares.”

Well, hardly anybody. Toma says he gets a lot of support from his organization. Although he works for a baseball team, he has gained the most attention from his work in football. The National Football League has called him in for all 24 Super Bowls. He has done the fields for the Pro Bowl football games, helped out in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

He has, with his son Chip, formed a company that works on sports fields around the country and overseas in countries such as Japan and Taiwan.

“George has probably done more for the industry of groundskeeping than anyone else,” says Steve Wightman, turf manager for San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium. “He’s kind of elevated it up to a profession.”

In a 1982 feature on him, Sports Illustrated magazine called Toma the “Nitty Gritty Dirt Man.” He has also been called the “Sultan of Sod” and the “Turf Magician.”

Toma, who has endorsement contracts for various lawn products, appears to like the visibility.

“George is the type who would go to a stadium wearing a yellow jacket when everyone else was wearing dark green,” says Steve Cockerham, a turf agronomist at UC Riverside who worked with Toma during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. “It’s helping the industry.”

Perhaps groundskeeping doesn’t get respect because the mechanics of it are about as exotic as yard work.

In the case of grass playing fields, they are almost identical: Stadiums use the same varieties as homeowners do (Bermuda grass in the South; rye grasses, blue grasses and fescues in the North). The crews mow--albeit to very exacting standards--and fertilize.

The large grass embankment beyond the Royals’ outfield fence (the only other real grass is in the bullpens) is more brown than green during the early part of the baseball season, so Toma and his crew use a special grass paint to make it look pretty for TV.

As for the artificial turf, Toma says maintaining it can be even more demanding than the real stuff. His crew has to sweep the field, vacuum around the base pits to get the dirt out (otherwise the turf would harden like concrete) and shampoo it to remove the tobacco and other stains. Should it be raining before a game, the crew will cover up the infield and, if necessary, use a sweeping machine that will take up excess water.

It’s in the art of the job--the juggling of sports, weather, personnel and other factors--that the great are separated from the merely good in the business, Toma says. “The most important part of it is the first three letters in the word management: M-A-N.”

Does all that work really affect the game? It does indeed. Longer-cut grass will, for example, slow down a ground ball, make bunts harder to field and affect the performance of a running back. If, for instance, one Super Bowl team is used to artificial turf and the other to a longer-cut grass, the league may instruct Toma to cut the grass at an in-between length for the championship games.

Some groundskeepers can carry it all too far. In adjusting the length of the grass in the infield, they may subtly grade the areas around the foul lines so that a ball will roll fair instead of foul, or vice versa. They can slow down a visiting team with fast runners by giving the base paths a heavy watering.

That’s not to say that there aren’t legitimate changes too. Some teams like the dirt in the batters’ box packed hard. Toma says Wade Boggs, the Boston Red Sox star, has criticized him for making the ground too hard to dig cleats into. Pitchers want their mounds certain ways. All of that requires continual interaction with players and coach.

Toma was born in the coal-mining town of Edwardsville, Pa. He got into groundskeeping, he said, because he thought mining was too dangerous. Except for a stint in the Army during the Korean War, he has been a groundskeeper since graduating from high school. He worked first for the minor leagues--the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers. In 1957, he broke into the major leagues with the Kansas City Athletics. When the A’s moved to Oakland a decade later, he stayed to work with the Kansas City Chiefs football team. That team moved with the Kansas City Royals soon after into a new stadium with artificial turf.

What is perhaps Toma’s greatest triumph came in 1981 when the NFL called him in to help turn around Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The field was in terrible shape--big chunks would come loose when football players ran on it. “We had a team song called ‘Slip-Sliding Away,’ ” recalled Barney Barron, the local superintendent of parks.

The field’s condition was especially important then because the San Francisco 49ers were to use it for their playoff games. Toma’s solution: Put a new layer of sod on top. Despite heavy rains and delays, it held up very well through both playoff games.

“What he’s respected for is the short-term event,” Cockerham says. “What makes him controversial is that he’s very outspoken and opinionated.”

A personality conflict prompted Toma to resign from the Stadium Turf Managers Assn., which he had founded with four others in 1980. Perhaps Toma’s most controversial event, though, is the 1989 Super Bowl in Miami, where the field came apart midway through the game. In an interview afterward, Toma seemed to put the blame on another groundskeeper.

“He’s undoubtedly brought a great deal of recognition to our profession,” Barron says, but “George has a way of laying the blame on someone else other than himself.”

None of that seems to faze Toma, who is now busy on other projects, among them a mysterious light green patch of grass growing in one of the Royals’ bullpens.

“That’s a different grass we’re fooling around with,” he says. “Maybe it could be one of the grasses that could be grown inside of a dome.”

Grow a grass field indoors? “I think it could be done,” says the Sultan of Sod.