Video: On The Field

By Rich Mullins
The Tampa Tribune

Opie Cheek loves baseball. It’s the baseball players who drive him nuts.

With their sharp metal cleats, players dig, gouge, tear and grind up Opie’s pride and joy: the immaculate grounds of the Clearwater Threshers baseball stadium, where he is chief groundskeeper. Chief architect, cultivator and surgeon of the living field.

“Look at this! I mean, come on!” he says, scowling at the victimized grass just beyond the infield. Cautious shortstops keep backing up and wearing ugly holes in the grass. “Come on. Be a man!” (He mumbles to no one in particular.) “Get up close and do your job - on the clay. Wussy shortstops.”

Opie paces and offers a running monologue of baseball, of turf, of clay and players who damage his precious field, his temple to baseball. Some people can ramble all day about their kids, or their boss, or their neighbors. Opie can expound for hours with authority on grooming baseball parks.

He has been tending baseball grounds for more than 20 years. This is a guy with tattoos of baseball stadiums down his arms. And his field won the award for best grounds in the Florida minor leagues for three years running.

Thresher executives so respect Opie’s skills that they put him in TV commercials and made an “Opie” bobble head doll. It sold thousands.

Now Opie has a new guy to ramble to: me. Opie is my boss for the day. It’s 11 hours until game time and there is clay to rake, grass to trim, and lines to paint. But before I get to try any of that, he assigns me to the bottom of the groundskeeper food chain: cleaning out dugouts. A janitor job, really.

My Dugout Blast

Cleaning comes easily to me. My first real job was janitor of a church and day care center at age 14. And I can say with authority that toddlers with leaky diapers leave less mess than baseball players in a dugout.

“Pretty nasty, eh?” says Zach Rickerd, my dugout partner, nodding at the debris.

The dugout looks like a frat house got in a fight with a landfill and both sides lost. There are thousands of chewed-up paper cups, millions of sunflower seed husks, clumps of used chewing tobacco. I mean really, there’s a trash can right there. Can’t they use it?

Clearly, this job calls for power tools. I strap on a backpack Husqvarna power blower, the kind landscapers use, and start blasting the dugout with a 100-mph wind. Cups fly. Seeds shoot in spirals. Tobacco splats everywhere.

Zach and I dump the debris into a virginal trash can (are we the first to use it?), and Zach hooks up a hose to water down the whole place. Eventually, it’s presentable again.

How Hot Is It?

The water helps cut heat, which might as well be 350 degrees on the field if you ask me. The sun reflects around the concrete walls and it feels like gamma radiation cooking my eyeballs. The air even tastes hot.

Meanwhile, Opie produces a fountain of quotable wisdom.

1) On baseball players: “These cleats they wear. We call them roto-tillers, how they dig into my field. I can’t watch.”

2) On cutting designs in the grass: “It’s nice to have nice grass, but, like I said, clay is the science part. Grass is a craft.”

3) On the struggles of groundskeeping: “And they wonder why I drink.”

After dugouts, Opie gives me a promotion and fires up a red three-wheeled John Deere tractor that drags a metal rake to smooth out the clay border around the field. My job: Just drive around and don’t run into the wall.

Tractor. Now we’re talking. Four laps of the field and I’ve smoothed everything out. “Not bad,” Opie says.

My next job: Paint lines from home plate to the outfield poles. Those lines mark if balls go fair or foul - so it’s kind of vital to paint them straight.

To do this, you string a tight cord from point to point and drive over it with a kind of skateboard that holds a spray paint can. “Hey, Opie,” I yell, “I’m gonna paint your name in the outfield. Is that OK?”

“Go ahead, see what happens,” Opie laughs. At least I think he’s laughing. I didn’t hear really because I’m trying to keep the line straight. Opie judges my painted line and says “Straight, but kind of wide. Like a NFL sideline. TOUCHDOWN!!”

Temple 24/7

Here’s the thing about their baseball field. Opie and his crew consider it their personal territory. And no detail is too small. Earlier, Zach hand-wiped clay stains off the giant rubber rain tarp. It’s a tarp, and he’s doing the “wax on, wax off” thing.

The crew’s relationship to the field is like a father to his daughter. Of course you want your daughter to be beautiful, even on prom night. But you don’t want anyone to actually touch her, much less date her.

They don’t do this for the money, either. Entry-level pay for groundskeepers is about $8.50 per hour. They do it because they looooove baseball. They sit in the stands and watch games on their field, and that’s the payoff for a job well-done.

They regularly work from 8 a.m., through a game, to 10:30 at night, seven days a week for months on end. There are home games three to five days a week in the season, plus a lots of other events in between:

•Senior citizen baseball leagues that play four games a day some weeks.

•A string of high school-age league teams.

•Promotional soccer games and kickball tournaments. And no, that’s not a joke. Kickball.

And there are the concerts. “They drive 65-ton semi trucks full of concert equipment on my field,” Opie says. “I just can’t watch. They put plywood and rubber tarps on my grass for days. Plywood. And they wonder why I drink.” (That’s one of Opie’s favorite sayings.)

Pesky Players

About 3 p.m., the first baseball players emerge for batting practice and it’s break time.

We relax in the equipment garage, chug Powerade and sit on partially broken chairs between tractors and bags of fertilizer. There’s a TV bolted to the wall, and somehow it’s always turned to “The Jerry Springer Show” or “Cheaters.”

I’m starting to think Zach is a clean freak. He has changed into the official Threshers polo shirt for the game, and he’s spraying glass cleaner on his black sneakers. Rand Stollmack is outside hand scrubbing bases with dishwashing soap and a brush.

Rand got into groundskeeping 15 years ago after years in construction and a decision to try something “totally different.” Zach got a summer job doing this because his mom is a friend of Opie’s.

“This was my dream job,” Zach says. “I didn’t even care if they paid me.”

And Opie - well - he’s just been doing this forever. Did I mention the baseball park tattoos? Only a tattoo of his wife’s name, Cheryl, outranks the others.

When the game starts, I see why Opie and the crew go nuts watching the players. Right there a player grinds his cleats into my outfield. And there, a player smears my fresh foul line. Is that necessary?

I swear, if I see a player drop a paper cup in my dugout I’m not responsible for what happens next.

The Big Inning

For us in the crew, the big event of the game is mid-fifth inning “drag,” when we pull big metal grids around the infield to smooth out the clay. It’s our only really public event, and it’s kind of nerve-wracking because 8,900 fans have nothing to do but eat hot dogs and stare at me dragging a doormat.

I’m the last in the procession and Zach says to just follow him. As the teams switch places, we leap out of the dugout, drop our mats on the field and start smoothing clay. (Actually, I drop my 30-pound metal mat on my heel, taking off a nice chunk of skin.)

We finish, and this pretty much ends our official duties for the night. And lookie there, that refrigerator under the stands has a few cold beers. Handy, that.

After the game, Opie says, “That’s all there is to it. We’ll do it all over again for the next game.”

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919 or rmullins@tampatrib.com.

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