Check out Toronto's New-Look Infield That Was Modeled after Baltimore's

Blue Jays fans are undoubtedly pumped to welcome their team back to Toronto. But when they walk into the Rogers Centre on Friday night, they might save a cheer or two for the new-look infield.

Stephen Brooks hardly counts as an unbiased observer, but after he gave me a close-up look at the new digs on Wednesday, I had to agree with his assessment.

"Your first impression is that it's a change and it's a good one," said Brooks, the Jays' senior VP of business operations. "It's pretty impressive. It feels like a ballpark."

That it does—because on Friday, for the first time in the Blue Jays' history, they will play on a regulation dirt infield, just as the other 29 big-league teams do.

Crews are expected to work late into the night Wednesday applying the final touch—a layer of Turface, a top-dressing soil conditioner. Under the Turface is a 12-inch base, the top portion of which is a clay, sand and silt mixture that felt rock-hard when we walked on it. But that is the standard composition and texture of the subsurface of a big-league field, Brooks said.

"This is the Cadillac version of infield material," he said.

And the surface is perfectly level, made so by apparatus that does laser-leveling. "That took hours and hours for days and days," Brooks said.

Equally meticulous was the process of leveling the joints between the AstroTurf and the dirt portion of the infield to minimize bad hops. Workers used a construction-grade tamper—sometimes with a man standing on it to add weight—to compress those seams.

The new infield will significantly change the job of head groundkeeper Tom Farrell and his crew. Now they have a full dirt infield to maintain, which includes figuring how much water to apply before games and brushing the soil particles out of the turf after each game in the areas where dirt meets turf. That cleanup work, and the daily leveling of low spots in the turf with rubber infill, puts workers on their hands and knees at times, brushing in the tiny black pellets with their hands.

Before embarking on this project, Brooks said the players were asked which infields they liked the most. Baltimore's Camden Yards was the consensus pick. To the extent possible, the Toronto infield is modeled after Baltimore's.

The goal was to make an infield that the players like, that would reduce the wear and tear on their bodies and that would provide a more appealing esthetic for fans.

Brooks says he's confident those missions were accomplished. He acknowledges that maintenance will involve trial and error at the beginning, and those in charge will be listening carefully to the players' early reviews. (The Jays will hold an optional workout on Thursday's off-day, giving them their first opportunity to form an opinion.)

It has been a grind for the grounds crew. In the midst of the installation at the Rogers Centre, some of them were sent to Montreal last weekend to prepare the Olympic Stadium diamond for the Jays' two exhibition games with the Red Sox.

"These guys have been working from 7 AM until 11:30 at night, two shifts, for a couple weeks now," Brooks said. "They're tired, but they've done a heck of a job. They feel proud."

And they're hoping the fans and players will soon share that sentiment.

All photos by John Lott