Illinois Farmer Pitches Pure Clay to Baseball Teams

Todd Bark has heard the jokes before. Yes, it’s a dirty business. Sure, his money is dirty. Of course, he’s a dirt farmer.

But that’s what you get when your business is selling clay to major league baseball. That, and a rather nice living.

Dense clay from Bark’s bottomland has become the soil of choice for pitcher’s mounds and batter’s boxes at major league stadiums from New York to California, Florida to Detroit.

It’s the stuff St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire plants his cleats in and the footing for pitchers like Yankees ace Orlando Hernandez.

“When you’ve got a power swing like McGwire does, you want something that will keep your foot from sliding out from under you,” Cardinals groundskeeper Bill Findley said. “You don’t get that from other stuff.”

Bark’s clay lies just beneath the weeds and topsoil of the Monroe County river bottoms in southwestern Illinois, across a lonely road from where he grew up. The 12-acre plot isn’t much to look at, but close examination reveals thick veins of rich, impurity-free clay known as “gumbo.”

It’s the kind of clay that sticks hard to your boots if it’s too wet and can suck a shoe right off your foot. But with just the right amount of moisture, the clay allows pitchers and batters excellent footing without breaking off or leaving holes, Findley said.

The baseball world discovered the benefits of Bark’s land a few years ago when he was working on the groundskeeping crew at Busch Stadium, home of the Cardinals.

Steve Peeler, now head groundskeeper for the Seattle Mariners, asked Bark to repair holes in the pitcher’s mound with a gooey “gray muck” that seemed to Bark ill-suited for something meant to keep million-dollar pitchers from losing their footing and breaking an ankle.

Then he brought in a bag of his clay. Within months, Bark was striking a deal with Pro’s Choice, a company that distributes groundskeeping products for athletic fields.

Sale of the dirt now makes up the majority of his six-figure income, said Bark, who quit working for the Cardinals after he started selling them dirt.

He sells as much as 400 tons a year of the material to Pro’s Choice at $150 a ton. It sells for much more than that on the retail market, and the market is still expanding, he said.

“Every year it gets bigger and bigger,” he said.

From initial tests with the White Sox and the Cardinals, the use of Bark’s product has spread to a dozen major league teams. Bark’s clay also is used by the Angels, Reds, Tigers, Dodgers, Brewers, Mariners, Pirates, Marlins, Devil Rays and Yankees, according to Charlie Selvik, co-owner of Pro’s Choice.

The company also markets the product to hundreds of universities, municipalities and Little Leagues across the country.

McGwire insists on the material, Findley said, and other players have praised it as well.

The secret is in the makeup of the clay, which is free of sand and other impurities that would make it break apart more easily, Selvik said.

Players’ cleats easily grip the soil but don’t pull out huge chunks. That helps improve safety and performance while reducing repair time for groundskeepers, Selvik said.

“We’ve looked all over. This stuff is just perfect, it really is,” he said.

Bark says he has enough gumbo from his spread to last a few more years. And he has his eye on some more land nearby that he says has even better clay than the current crop.

“As long as he has it, we’ll take it,” Selvik said.