For years we have heard Paul Beeston promise a change in the Rogers Centre from artificial turf to real grass. Shapiro's comments this week indicated that grass was not a priority over other stadium upgrades to improve the fan experience. Those comments were rather disappointing for many fans who had expected that 2018 was still the target for a grass surface.
For many fans, it isn't just about the aesthetics of watching a game played on a real lawn, but rather the impact that turf has on the players. Generally speaking, players have complained about the pounding their bodies take with playing on turf. Underneath that green stuff that you see is nothing but hard concrete. However, the new turf that was installed at the onset of 2015, is considerably softer/spongier than the turf that was there before, and an even more significant upgrade from the turf that the dome originally had.
We didn't hear much complaining about the turf during 2015 up until the first game of the playoffs when the US broadcasting knuckleheads started to blame Beltre's back trouble from playing a couple of innings on it. Which of course made no sense. He had barely touched the ball to that point. If standing on that stuff for 2 innings ruins your back we would all be crippled for taking a walk down a concrete sidewalk. It's more of a long term thing with artificial turf, one would think.
Installing grass in the Rogers Centre would be a really big deal, And really expensive I'd imagine. Grass needs drainage, light, airflow, and water. The stadium is not designed for it at all. For now, it seems that Shapiro sees this as something he doesn't want to tackle.
However, I was surprised that Shapiro gave no concrete (pardon the pun) news on the dirt infield option. This would mean that the artificial turf stays but a dirt cutout is made along the infield and baselines (see the imagined image above but picture turf instead of the grass where you see green...more or less). Tropicana field in Tampa Bay, the only other artificial turf surface in MLB, has a dirt infield. That means that the Rogers Centre is the only MLB park that currently does not have a dirt infield. There are only dirt cutouts immediately around each base. This was reportedly an option for 2016 now that the Argos won't be playing there, but we have heard no news on it. The Sportsnet articles this week on Shapiro's comments said that the dirt infield was still an option for 2016. However, I was discouraged because I thought if the plan was to do this then surely they would know by now to tell us one way or the other.
Then tonight, Stephen Brooks (Senior Vice President of business for the Blue Jays) tweets in response to a question on whether a dirt infield will be in place for 2016 saying "Plan to start in Feb.". Ok, so that is the first positive confirmation we have had that this is indeed happening. By "start" I assume he means to start digging into the concrete. You can't just sprinkle dirt over the concrete of course.
That's really good news. Out of concern for the long term health of Tulo and Donaldson who will now effectively be playing their defense on dirt instead of turf. This effectively makes playing at home for them no different than any other ballpark in terms of surface. There are situations where they would be running for balls on the turf but that's not a big deal.
I'm not one of these Shapiro haters like I see all over twitter. It takes years for someone in his position to be successful or fail. To decide he is going to do one of those things within a couple of months seems ridiculous to me. I will say though, that he'd have done himself a favour this week by announcing the dirt infield at the same time as saying that grass was not a priority. Always good to soften the bad news with a little bit of good news. To have the news come out by Stephen Brooks in a tweet seems a little odd.
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