TAMPA — Dan Moeller’s known for two decades what some of the kids on his staff are about to find out: When pulling a tarp across an infield in the rain, it’s best to pull from the corners. The guys who pull from the middle are the ones who trip, slip, and end up underneath the thing. Also, a wet tarp is a heavy tarp. Getting it off the field is often harder than getting it on.
“You feel it in your hammys,” Moeller said.
As director of projects and field operations for the Tampa Bay Rays, Moeller is in charge of the team’s grounds crew. He has seven full-time employees and eight part-time workers, and most of them gathered in the infield grass 32 minutes before first pitch on Friday to watch one of their own spray a yellow sunburst logo on the back of the mound.
For the first time ever, that logo fit more than the franchise’s name. The Rays really were playing baseball in the sun.
Friday’s season opener at George M. Steinbrenner Field could hardly have gone any better. Six months after Hurricane Milton shredded the roof of Tropicana Field, the Rays had a new home. The building was transformed with Rays signage. The temperature was 84 degrees with a cooling breeze to left field. Ryan Pepiot pitched six innings, a two-run rally tied the game in the seventh, and Kameron Misner — a 27-year-old on his first Opening Day roster — hit a walk-off homer in the ninth. The whole thing was a triumph of organizational problem-solving and late-inning execution. The Rays are undefeated.
And now the real challenge begins.
The Rays celebrate Kameron Misner’s walk-off to give them a 3-2 win in their opener at Steinbrenner Field. (Kim Klement Neitzel / Imagn Images)
It begins for infielders dripping with sweat in the Florida humidity, and for outfielders fighting the wind in an open-air stadium with no third deck. It begins for starting pitchers trying to get through six innings in the blazing summer heat, and for a coaching staff worried about rain delays and dreading bullpen-wrecking doubleheaders. There’s going to be no place in baseball this summer quite like Steinbrenner Field.
“We want to create some home-field advantage with that,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “I’d like to look up in two or three weeks when it gets hot in the summer and see that we are embracing it, and other teams are bitching about it.”
Moeller doesn’t want to hear any complaints. The mound is still 60 feet, six inches from home plate. The bases are still 90 feet apart. Baseball is baseball. But a Rays grounds crew that cut its teeth maintaining artificial turf in a climate-controlled environment now has to water and mow and maintain a ballfield in the sun.
Moeller and head groundskeeper Mike Deubel know what people assume about their jobs at Tropicana Field: that they’ve been in charge of carpet, basically. It’s a description that’s both completely wrong and utterly unfair (though, the fact they’ve had to sweep sunflower seeds with a dustpan and broom hasn’t helped dispel that notion). Do you know how to maintain moisture in infield dirt that’s being constantly sucked dry by the concrete underneath and the air conditioning above? It’s not easy.
But Moeller and his crew are now managing natural grass in a notoriously precarious climate that goes from blazing heat to sudden downpour in an instant. Moeller and Deubel have worked outside before. They know what they’re up against. Some of their staff, on the other hand, are in for a nightly lesson in patience, precision and wet socks.
Moeller increased his budget to afford extra clothes so that his crew can change when they get soaked in a popup shower, and he sent most of his crew to work for the Yankees during spring training so that they could learn first-hand how to prepare the field (some of the Yankees crew is sticking around to help).
The Rays’ crew actually got to pull the tarp a couple of times this spring, but they still haven’t pulled it in the middle of the eighth inning, when Pete Fairbanks is getting loose in the bullpen and a mid-game shower has become a total downpour because umpires waited too long, fingers crossed, hoping the rain might magically go away. They haven’t pulled the tarp when they’re already soaking wet, it’s getting late, and there’s no telling when they’re getting home.
“Welcome to the big leagues,” Moeller said.
That same idea holds true for the Rays players, as well. Many of them have been in the big leagues for years, but never quite like this. Pepiot spent a little more time in the sauna this spring. He also lingered in the hot tub and went on post-workout walks with his wife. Anything to get his body used to the heat.
“No one is ever going to get used to 105 and disgusting humidity,” Pepiot said. “But a little bit more acclimated to it.”
The Rays tested their players in spring training to determine how much they sweat — second baseman Brandon Lowe is a Tier 2, moderate sweater — and used that information to help individualize plans for how much water and sodium players are going to have to replace each night. Shortstop Taylor Walls, though, grew up in Georgia and played college ball at Florida State. He’s convinced the heat and humidity will be manageable for nine innings. He’s more worried about the rain, because when those sudden Gulf Coast showers linger, they’re going to rain out some ballgames, and doubleheaders in this climate are going to be exhausting.
That’s what Cash is most worried about, too. He can limit his team’s pregame work to keep players rested, and he can pump them full of water to keep them hydrated, but doubleheaders are hell on a pitching staff, and while Steinbrenner Field has fans with misters in the dugout, it has nothing to stop the rain.
Major League Baseball has tweaked the Rays schedule in deference to the Florida weather. The Rays play 19 home games between March 28 and April 20, meaning they’ll play almost a quarter of their home schedule before the summer even begins. The tradeoff is that the Rays will play only 12 home games between June 23 and August 18. They’re going to spend about half of August on a two-week, four-city, West Coast road trip that will include a stop in Sacramento to play the Athletics in the other minor league ballpark hosting Major League games this season.
Sun, rain, wind and shadows at home. Longer-than-usual trips on the road. It’s going to be completely unfamiliar, but the Rays won on Opening Day with a strong pitching staff and a deep bench, so maybe it’s not so different after all.
“A lot of differences,” Cash said. “But now we can probably take a breath, and we’ll spend probably hours talking about how we can make it to our advantage.”
(Top photo of Steinbrenner Field on Friday: Mike Carlson/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
