Baseball Purists Stand Up!

[Mikey]

You have a problem with black cyclone fences?

You know it's there to protect the fans behind the plate, don't you?

[Left Seater]

All the baseball purists died shortly after lights went up at Wrigley.

Sorry, there arent any left.

[Wolfman]

Maybe we can "thank" these folks?



Maybe it all began with pool tables in colors other than green.

[Felix]

Maybe we can "thank" these folks?

that is one good looking field.....


that, ehhh not so much......

but I can definitely see an advantage to having a red baseball field of artificial turf.....no crazy hops and you can pick the ball up much easier coming off the bat......

[MgoBlue-LightSpecial]

The red field is only the second most appalling feature, next to the NECKCAR motif.

[Dinsdale]

Eastern Washington is such an attractive place to begin with, the red turf really accents it nicely.

[Dinsdale]

I read someone's theory once about Boise - something to the effect of the All Blue uniforms blending into the field color creates problems for the opposition

Example, a QB scrambling and looking downfield may not see a lurking DB or a LB may have problems picking up a back out of the backfield

Don't know if there's any validity to it but its interesting nonetheless

I've bitched about that over the years, but probably due to my disdain for BSU. Is it really different from Oregon or Baylor's color scheme as far as contrast? Although those teams mix in different colors, BSU usually goes with solid blue, and maybe blue on blue is harder for the eye to pick up than green on green... I dunno.

[Left Seater]

that, ehhh not so much......

Nice Jr High stadium they have there in Eastern Washington.

Sincerely,

Texas High School football



*seats 1500 more in permanent seats and 4500 more with temporary bleachers in place in the endzones

[Derron]

This one is truly horrible if it has carpet on the pitchers mound and batters box. Most synthetic fields have dirt / clay pitchers mounds. No dirt skinned area at all. The trend is growing each year. Baseball is one of the most expensive sports to maintain a field on natural turf and dirt skinned areas. Very, very labor intensive. The last field we built they wanted grass base paths. Ok, that cuts down on a lot of maintenance. I get that. It is all about the money and time required to maintain a natural surface at an even barely passable level.

There is a higher cost to build a synthetic surface, mostly in the cost of the carpet. You just cut in some drains, lay down about 16 inches of base rock, laser grade it and roll it down. Roll the carpet out, glue it together and put down about 1/2 inch of silica sand and then crumb rubber on top of it. Done. Building a natural surface is a bit more labor intensive. A decent synthetic surface should last 10 years, then you have to replace the carpet. A natural surface is going to have continual maintenance needs.

Weather plays a huge factor in wetter climates. This is a D 2 school in Oregon after a rainy game night. The field was basically destroyed and took about
$ 15,000 worth of work over the next three weeks to be of service. The field is now plastic. There are probably 6 fields going in every year in our area, even at the small schools. A basic football field plastic is a million bucks give or take.



This is as field we built at a high school in the Willamette Valley. Just the beginning of the process.



Another field that was pretty much destroyed in the fall. We repaired this one and had it ready for spring sports. Repair cost was $ 11,000.



Turf needs aerated about twice per year, or as your budget can afford. This is a four field complex in Eugene.



You are going to have to top dress it about once a year. This is the site of the Little League Softball World Series every August.



Your skinned areas will require yearly applications of Turface or other calcined clay conditioners. minimum $ 3,000 grand.

Now a synthetic field needs this ran across it about once a week depending on contact hours and use. About $ 1,800 capital cost and 2 hours a week. And no hand work on the non skinned areas.



About once a year after the heaviest use, one of these needs or should be ran across the plastic field. Contractor would charge about $ 2,500 to do that.




You will see more and more of these surfaces appear. Baseball is the last professional holdout, although Tampa Bay and Toronto plays on carpet. It changes how the game is played somewhat, but purity sometimes has to take a back seat to economic reality. Toronto's field is old and a horrible surface.

[Dinsdale]

Derron has worked on a couple of ballfields/golf courses.

Sin,
MA

This is the site of the Little League Softball World Series every August.

Hey Wags -- in the other thread, you spoke of "best convenience chain in the country"?

Nice try. Those fields are at the HQ (which used to be on the outskirts, now in a nice neighborhood, quite out of place) of the parent company of Plaid Pantry. When they put on the Softball Little League WS(guess your daughter never made it)... they foot the bill. They have a velodrome for road bike racing... open to the public whenever there isn't an event. They (at least used to) have a BMX track... come and go as you please. They put on a huge Christmas show for the kids every year (since long before I was a kid)... free of charge. I can't even remember all the other things they do (besides produce high quality dairy products). Their casa is your casa.

And Plaid is less expensive that other convenience stores.


So, you were saying?

[Derron]

When they put on the Softball Little League WS(guess your daughter never made it)... they foot the bill.

Probably upwards of $ 40,000 to put the WS event on. Plus, they have multiple other fields that Little League and Softball play on. Kids play on them. No adults. The WS series event is huge. ESPN televised. An associate of mine does all the field work, lining and field painting, and does a great job. We usually go and watch the final game from his area on the field. The nicest thing about working on those fields was, that as contractors, we got free ice cream, as much as we could eat anytime during the day. That did not suck at all.

They have an event center, an opera house and a Western village. great company, great family. Carl Cadenau and daughter Tracy, who is pretty damned good looking as well, are huge youth and community supporters. Other companies could take a page from their play book.

[Dinsdale]

Other companies could take a page from their play book.

If only.

Their Mission Statement for the last 100 (?) years has been to make serving the community the #1 priority, and they ace it, and still make their $$$.

Fucking RACK Alpenrose Dairy. No one around here has a bad word to say about them, and I often make a stop at Plaid just to buy their (superior quality) milk. Everything is cheaper at Plaid, except their own milk... ponderous.

BTW -- way back when, we used to go pick shrooms in the old pastures there (long since retired). Even in the daytime, I'm sure they must have known what we were up to, and never said anything. See, they're so cool, they even got us high for free.

[Left Seater]

Derron or Dins,

Do HS teams other than football use the football fields? Same for baseball?


Seems to me that the field in the D2 photo needs more crown and the officials need to better enforce the sideline. Put a carpet down over the team area just off the sideline and take it up immediately after the game and the sideline should be just fine.

[War Wagon]

Hey Wags --

When they put on the Softball Little League WS(guess your daughter never made it)...

I guess not. I didn't even know there was a LL Softball World Series, but we went to national tourneys in Columbus GA and Beaumont TX during her summer teams seasons.

But her claim to fame (besides being the most awesome daughter ever) was that she helped Oak Park HS reach the Final Four of the Missouri State Softball CS. Oak Park had never done that and most likely never will again. That was a special team.

Anyways, they faced Helias, a loaded Catholic school out of Jefferson City, in the semis. They had this wicked girl named Lauren Delaney who pitched 70+ mph. Oak Park got shut out 2-0 in a two hitter.

Guess who got those 2 hits?

My daughter is on the "Wall of Fame" at Oak Park. Damn, I miss watching her play. But watching her coach a college team is some consolation.

[smackaholic]

maybe i should hire derron for my "yard".

care to submit a bid?

[MgoBlue-LightSpecial]

Nice Jr High stadium they have there in Eastern Washington.

Sincerely,

Texas High School football

Is prioritizing football over academics at the high school level really supposed to be some sort of bragging point?

[MgoBlue-LightSpecial]

I've bitched about that over the years, but probably due to my disdain for BSU. Is it really different from Oregon or Baylor's color scheme as far as contrast? Although those teams mix in different colors, BSU usually goes with solid blue, and maybe blue on blue is harder for the eye to pick up than green on green... I dunno.

Here I thought Michigan State won the Rose Bowl due to stout defense and a balanced offense. But it was probably the uniforms.

[Moving Sale]

When they put on the Softball Little League WS(guess your daughter never made it)... they foot the bill.

Probably upwards of $ 40,000 to put the WS event on. Plus, they have multiple other fields that Little League and Softball play on. Kids play on them. No adults. The WS series event is huge. ESPN televised. An associate of mine does all the field work, lining and field painting, and does a great job.

The only way to sod a field propery takes lots of work and money. First you have to dig a big hole a few feet deep the size of the field. Then line it with plastic that is angled for drainage. Then add rocks. Top rocks with "plant material" (basically a plastic that drains but won't let roots of grass get to the rocks) then add some loamy soil and top with sod or seeds. This will keep the soil from every being water logged and thus save your field from distruction. It's expensive to do, but saves big money in the long run. And you can reuse the water that comes off the drain in places with less water than say.... Oregon.
Your welcome.

[Moving Sale]

Tnx dims.

[Left Seater]

Nice Jr High stadium they have there in Eastern Washington.

Sincerely,

Texas High School football

Is prioritizing football over academics at the high school level really supposed to be some sort of bragging point?

You are assuming that it is an either/or equation. And you would be wrong.



A larger stadium allows for more tickets to be sold, therefore more income. Seperate bonds are usually issued for stadiums. Chair back seats allow season tickets to be priced in the multiple hundred dollar range. Booster clubs with $100K + budgets cover travel expenses and equipment. Many schools spend very little on football.


Plus, the schools with these very large stadiums usually excel at education as well.

[MgoBlue-LightSpecial]

Most college programs take a bath after expenses. Are these high schools profiting from football, and how is the money allocated?

Regardless, high school football at this level is just unseemly and over-the-top. You already have big time college football and NFL...isn't that enough? You freaks should broaden your horizons a bit.

[Left Seater]

No, they are not profiting or making huge money.

Some places have an athletic booster club, others have sport specific booster clubs. The money goes back to the kids and the school via less expenditures on football. Hell, the radio rights fees alone can get some schools $25K or more a season.

Many of us down here don't give a rip about NFL football. Sure the cowboys and saints have their following, but talk radio outside of Dallas and Houston spends very little time on the NFL.

[Derron]

Derron or Dins,

Do HS teams other than football use the football fields? Same for baseball?


Seems to me that the field in the D2 photo needs more crown and the officials need to better enforce the sideline. Put a carpet down over the team area just off the sideline and take it up immediately after the game and the sideline should be just fine.

Most fields either synthetic or natural have soccer played on them and lacrosse as well. The synthetics are all lined that way, pretty busy looking but has to be functional. The naturals can be re - painted as needed. In schools that have limited space on natural turf, soccer is often laid over the outfield turf. This really fucks up a baseball outfield. Football pretty much puts the bulk of the wear on the field between the hash's and the 20's. Soccer does not tear it up as bad, but puts a huge amount of compaction down over the entire field. Working with these schools, I tried to get them to move the soccer off the baseball outfield, other wise it created a huge amount of work.

We did one field that was our 6A baseball champions that played only 2 home games on their field. We installed a drainage system that their boosters paid for and got them playing again.

Now for the crowning thing. How a natural turf field plays and wears is a function of the soil it is built on. Virtually every field built on natural turf was built at the end of a construction project or as a second though. Dirt is dirt right ?? These fields were built with existing native soils with no amendments. Most soils are not porous enough to allow proper drainage. So the mental midgets put these crowns on them of 5% or better to move the water off to the side of the field where they installed these horrible 12 inch drain lines with 2 inch rock in them and they may or may not take them out to sewer to dump.

The trouble with this is they were moving the water off the surface only, since their soils were not of a good enough profile to allow sub surface water movement either vertically or laterally. A natural soil field needs to be at least 65% sand to drain properly if you have a good grade. There are very few native soils that have that high a level of sand in them. If there was any play on the surface when the water is moving off it, then you had huge damage. These 5 % crowns also would not allow soccer players on the sides of the field to see where the ball was.

We did several of these crown knock offs where we went in and leveled the field out by taking the crown off, spreading the soil around to bring the field to about a .75% or 1% center grade. We then added up to 300 tons of sand or more to the existing soil profile, what ever amount it took to get that 65% to 75% sand number we needed to get the field to function. We also installed a drainage system of 3 inch drain tile every 10 feet, 14 inches of sand cover on top of the 3 inch tile, and then evacuated it to the storm sewer or retention basin.

If the field did not need a crown knock off, we could sand cap it with about 4 inches of sand, raise the sprinklers, grade it out and seed it up. We liked to have a drain system on these, but those ran about 70k per field. Sand capping on gold courses has been real popular here in the wet Northwest and makes a course play all year long, throwing out a few names here for Dins, Camas, Langdon farms, Ridgefield.

You can also use straight sand for the base, on these turf fields, but sand base fields bring a whole new set of challenges. If your sprinklers do not come on in the summer, good bye field in about 8 hours or less. Have lots of water because you will be watering them 6 times a day. Golf courses do well on straight sand, Sand Pines, all the Bandon Dune courses are built on sand, excepting the greens since those are built to USGA spec anyway.

No PLASTIC is used in building these fields. There are barrier fabrics used on the sub base of the synthetic fields to hold the gravel at compaction levels and to eliminate sinking.

This is a field that had issues. Note the condition of the skinned area. The soil holding together like that is indication of high levels of clay, the smallest soil particle. We add sand, the largest soil particle to try and get a workable soil.



This is a baseball field we rehabbed a few years back. The native soil was a Marquam class soil ion the northern Willamette valley. These soils are as close to perfect as you will find a native soil, thank you Missoula Floods. Huge farming area with unheard of yields there. We added some sand, and then clay on the batters box and pitchers mounds. The blade box we put a laser receiver on that pole and hook it up to the tractor hydraulics. We set a transmitter on grade and you just drive the tractor in circles and it gives you a perfect grade.

[Derron]

Why are they wasting any money on football fields in Oregon, none of them go on to play for the Ducks?

You wrote this first ???

In this town there are 5 public High Schools in the district, all 5 have their own stadiums on the school grounds, the synthetic fields thet play on will be used for the 3 football teams home games plus they use them for boys and girls soccer and boys and girls lacrosse as well as having the track and field meets on the track that surrounds the fields.
All the High Schools also have 2 baseball stadiums, the varsity fields are locked up tight, some of the JV fields are. the freshman team will play opposite of where the JV and Varsity teams play, most freshman teams play on the JV fields

I suppose that your instate schools all get their players from the highs schools and bring in no outside players ??? :doh: :doh:

[Left Seater]

Thanks for the info.

Another thing I noticed in that photo with the water logged football field is the water standing around the track. Here I am used to seeing a 6 inch gutter all around the inside of the track to remove excess surface water. This is in addition to the sub surface drainage you spoke about.

Here in central Texas there is rock just a few inches below the surface. This means turf fields require almost 100% trucked in dirt and amendments. However, turf fields are almost all gone now for game fields. Turf is only at the HS itself for practice.

[Moving Sale]

Adding sand to clay soil makes them hard as concrete. You have to add sand and organic matter when you have high clay content, which is what we have here. The soil needs to be loamy.

And in order to do it right you need some kind of lower barrier like plastic or at least grade the subsurface clay soil for runoff or the whole thing is a waste of time and money. If the subsurface soil has adaqute drainage and you don't want to collect the runoff then you can do it without a subsurface barrier like plastic.

[Dinsdale]

Moving Sale trying to lecture Derron on how to build a ballfield, WHEN HE OWNS A COMPANY THAT BUILDS BALLFIELDS, is just so...

Moving Sale.

[Mikey]

http://thebiglead.com/2014/08/14/univer ... h.QunyXpJo

This is horrible. The NCAA needs to step in and stop this shit. Baseball, football, etc.

The on-deck circles are waaay too small too.

[Moving Sale]

Moving Sale trying to lecture Derron on how to build a ballfield, WHEN HE OWNS A COMPANY THAT BUILDS BALLFIELDS, is just so...

Moving Sale.

Name one thing I said that was wrong.

[Dinsdale]

Name one thing I said that was wrong.

All of it

Unless you're claiming to know more on the subject than every single golf course builder/greenskeeper around here.

[Moving Sale]

You're full of shit then. Not every turf field is made the way you say it is. Look at the field at UoP park in Phoenix. It rolls out of the stadium in its own self contained tray. That's the goal. You need to be able to separate the field drainage from the surrounding soil. It doesn't need to roll away from it like in AZ, but you need to be able to control the amount of water on the field. You can't do that without proper drainage... Full stop.

[Derron]

Adding sand to clay soil makes them hard as concrete. You have to add sand and organic matter when you have high clay content, which is what we have here. The soil needs to be loamy.

You want to take another run at this gibberish ?? Peruse this chart a bit and see where sand to clay makes " concrete". Ideal sports fields will be in the very lower left hand corner. Organic matter is less than 5% in most soils and is not a function of the soil structure or mineral content. Organic matter is in a constant state of decomposition. Ideally you would be continually add it in the form of soil bacterias or compost tea, but most crops and grass can be grown with out a lot of organic matter on soil profiles with the right inputs. Most soils have reasonably low clay contents since clay serves as more of a binder. Silt can be more of a problem that clay.

And in order to do it right you need some kind of lower barrier like plastic or at least grade the subsurface clay soil for runoff or the whole thing is a waste of time and money. If the subsurface soil has adaqute drainage and you don't want to collect the runoff then you can do it without a subsurface barrier like plastic.

On natural turf all you need is about 8 to 12 inches of decent modified / engineered soil with a drainage and irrigation system on spec and I could grow grass on a fucking parking lot.

There is never plastic barrier used in natural sports field construction. There are barrier fabrics used in building synthetic fields, but never plastic. Plastic is impermeable...tell me you knew that.

[Moving Sale]

Here is one, its from the south but clay and sand are clay and sand in the south or in Oregon.
http://thedailysouth.southernliving.com ... d-to-clay/

As far as a plastic barrier, I know you don't use one. You are old school, I get it. You have no idea why you are doing what your doing so you have no way if knowing how stupid it is.

And other questions?

[mvscal]

Derron has worked on a couple of ballfields/golf courses.

So he's got that going for him...which is nice.

[Derron]

Here is one, its from the south but clay and sand are clay and sand in the south or in Oregon.
http://thedailysouth.southernliving.com ... d-to-clay/

As far as a plastic barrier, I know you don't use one. You are old school, I get it. You have no idea why you are doing what your doing so you have no way if knowing how stupid it is.

And other questions?

Nice white flag you pus dripping cunt.

[Moving Sale]

Do you even know what a white flag is used for you stupid silly fuck?

I responded to your post. It's not my fault you are too stupid to read it, or too invested in your own dumb way of putting down a field to admit I'm right.

This basically means that YOU are the one 'white flagging.'

and dims- you cab stick your IKYABWAI in your syphilitic ass.

[Derron]

I responded to your post.

And as usual you were wrong.

invested in your own dumb way of putting down a field to admit I'm right.

You post a link from some hillbilly cousin fucking garden site that is quite wrong. I post method and process specified by civil engineers and architects.

This basically means that YOU are the one 'white flagging.

The one white flagging is you as Leroy jams 12 inches of that black cock you love so much down your worthless lying piehole.

[Moving Sale]

You could have just said you didn't put any stock in my link you inbred assfuck. You do know that is different than accusing me if a white flag right?

Anyways WTF to civil engineers and architects know about soil science and why are you blindly following what they say? Too stupid to know anything about soil science yourself?

Here is another:
See 1.
http://gardening.about.com/od/soil/a/GardenSoil.htm

And another:
First line.
http://patwelsh.com/wpmu/blog/soils/nev ... d-to-clay/

[Felix]

I read someone's theory once about Boise - something to the effect of the All Blue uniforms blending into the field color creates problems for the opposition

Example, a QB scrambling and looking downfield may not see a lurking DB or a LB may have problems picking up a back out of the backfield

Don't know if there's any validity to it but its interesting nonetheless

I've bitched about that over the years, but probably due to my disdain for BSU.

yes, from ground level they virtually disappear from view