Blue Wahoos Stadium transitioning from grass field to synthetic turf

2021-12-27 09:35:20 By : Ms. Emily Huang

Fred and Lisa Roth came to Blue Wahoos Stadium looking to repurchase their season tickets.

They left with part of the field.

In what became a farewell to the ballpark’s natural grass playing surface, the Blue Wahoos welcomed season-ticket holders to pick up chunks of sod before a turf company arrived Monday to carefully remove entire field and deliver to the City of Pensacola for future use.

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It’s been a project planned for a year, after the Blue Wahoos made the decision to switch to synthetic turf.

“I’ve been working on our yard for two years now and I have one good spot where I’m going to put this,” said Fred Roth, laughing, as he held a square slice of sod.

The Roths, who moved from Illinois two years ago and instantly fell in love with Blue Wahoos baseball, were part of a contingent of people that received keepsakes from the stadium.

By noon on Tuesday, the grass field was gone.

A team from Craft Turf Farms, near Gulf Shores, Ala., worked less than two days to precision roll hundreds of spools of sod. Part of the sod will be going to Pensacola’s Osceola Municipal Golf Course, while others will go to city parks.

It began a two-month process that will include Sporturf, a company specializing in synthetic surface athletic fields, to install an artificial grass surface, along with a traditional dirt infield, to match the Miami Marlins home field at LoanDepot Park.

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Before the artificial turf is installed, however, there will be a month of preparations to properly create the foundation, padding and drainage before Sporturf rolls in the synthetic grass.

“I think it’s a great thing for the community,” said Blue Wahoos president Jonathan Griffith. “I don’t think people realize how much more we are going to be able to do here with year-round usage, all because of having synthetic turf.”

Griffith understands the sentimentality aspect. He knows there are fans who desired to keep a grass field at the ballpark.

But there is the reality of how worn the field had become and the quest to maintain Blue Wahoos Stadium as a 12-month events facility.

In each of the past two years, while dealing with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the ballpark hosted more than 200 events besides Blue Wahoos baseball. Those events ranged from University of West Florida football games to high school graduations to music concerts and movie nights to the Nitro Circus stunt motorbike event, which attracted more than 6,500 fans in October.

“We have to all remember, this field is 11-years-old. It was the original surface for our first game,” Griffith said. “The lifespan of a grass field for a professional baseball team is seven years. And we have done 11 years.

“And we played college football on it. This field got every dollar out of it that we could and it’s one where you had to do something.

“To put a natural grass field in would cost roughly 40-percent less than a synthetic field. But with a synthetic turf, you will get an extra four years out of it.”

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The Blue Wahoos and the City of Pensacola earlier this year announced the upgrades, which also include installing LED lights to replace the existing lights at the ballpark. The combined cost will be more than $2 million.

Why synthetic turf? Why now? There are a multitude of reasons.

The Blue Wahoos have a 10-year partnership with the Miami Marlins as their Double-A affiliate. It matches the terms of a  license agreement signed by all Minor League Baseball teams with their respective affiliates, after Major League Baseball in late 2020 took over operations of the minor leagues.

Part of that agreement includes maintaining facility standards MLB wants.

By matching the surface, including the warning track and dirt infield, as LoanDepot Park, it will give the Marlins’ top talent in Double-A the same kind of playing-surface feel as when players advance to Miami. 

The Marlins’ High-A affiliate, the Beloit Sky Carp in Beloit, Wisc, which is co-owned by Blue Wahoos owners Quint and Rishy Studer, installed this same synthetic surface when moving into their new ballpark, ABC Supply Stadium, back in August.  The Marlins will now have two of their top three minor league levels playing on synthetic turf.

“It really helps our partnership with the Marlins,” said Griffith, noting the Marlins have been supportive of the move to synthetic turf. “They want their fields to be uniform and we’re going to be able to do it.”

Synthetic turf provides a durability and longevity that a grass surface cannot, especially with weather extremes. Twice in the Blue Wahoos’ 2019 season, lightning struck the pump station beyond left field, knocking out the irrigation system at the ballpark.

 It left the Wahoos with stretches of being unable to properly water the field. And with frequent thunderstorms during Pensacola’s summer weather, tarp covering and removal is so much easier on synthetic turf.

“You not only had the challenges of the weather, the tropical storms and hurricane (Sally in 2020), but this stadium is by far the most active ballpark in America,” said Dustin Hannah, the Blue Wahoos head groundskeeper, who worked tirelessly the past three years to keep the aging field in shape.

“So with that, it’s a challenge to keep the grass alive and playable. This will just help us deliver our mission even more and that’s to improve the quality of life in the community. We will be able to do more. We won’t have to have the field shut down for two months to get it ready for the next season.”

The new surface will have the same look as the grass field. There will be a clay-based infield, home plate area, and the warning tracks and bullpens will all have to be maintained.

During frequent rain in the summer, daily tarp pulls will still be needed to protect the infield during home games. But the Blue Wahoos will be able to further advance a robust schedule of non-sporting events.

“This opens the door for us to be that event center we always pushed for,” Griffith said. “I don’t think people realize how much more we are going to be able to do, because of having synthetic turf. There are many times we had to turn events down that we could have had.

“In Beloit, we just put an ice skating rink built on top of the turf. Now granted, it’s 30 degrees or lower up there (Wisconsin), so it naturally freezes. But we were never able to do things like that up there.”

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By late Tuesday, the stadium field looked like it did more than a decade ago before the grass was installed. The season-ticket holders who left with keepsake sod Sunday were glad they got it.

“Rishy and I went to the original ‘Field of Dreams’ (in Iowa) and we paid a $1 and got a vial to put some dirt in,” Quint Studer said. “My thought was, wouldn’t it be cool for people here, who want a piece of grass, they can take a piece.

“They can say, hey, this is where, say, (Reds star outfielder) Jesse Winker ran, or this is where another player now in the major leagues played. And they can have a piece of Blue Wahoos Stadium.”

A new era will soon begin.

Bill Vilona is a retired Pensacola News Journal sports columnist and now senior writer for Pensacola Blue Wahoos. He can be reached at bvilona@bluewahoos.com