Muck-Raking Probe at Dodger Stadium

It’s the final at-bats for baseball season, but we just can’t get enough dirt on the playing field at Dodger Stadium. The composition, texture and shape of the team’s home ground is a symphony of art and science, and the maestro is turf and grounds superintendent Eric Hansen. He has a degree in agronomy with a turf management specialty from Texas A&M; and spends four to five hours on game days grooming the field for optimal ball movement. For Hansen, the job is “all about how the ball bounces. We like to think we have an impact on how the team plays.” Turf wizards even have a term (“snaking”) for the effect produced when grass grain interferes with a rolling ball.

The turf-care needs of the field’s grassy portion differ, of course, from those of the infield dirt, or “skin,” a confection of 23% silt, 20% clay and 57% sand quarried from a Burbank site by the A.E. Schmidt Co. Skin has a one-eighth-inch layer of “top dressing” of calcined clay for moisture retention and vitrified clay for color; Hansen and his team roll out 20 tons of the stuff in a season.

Then there are the aesthetic considerations. The Dodgers’ Bermuda grass isn’t amenable to the jazzy outfield designs in vogue at cooler-weather parks using Kentucky bluegrass. But the grounds crew likes its checkerboard mowing pattern. And when it comes to color choice, Hansen orders a naturalistic dark brown for Dodger dirt over the fauvist reds chosen by other teams. While ball contrast is certainly a consideration, the creative muse also factors into the equation. The Dodgers had a redder field prior to the arrival of Hansen, who doesn’t favor that hue. “It’s kind of an artsy thing.”