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Vocations: The Baseball Groundskeeper: How to Polish a Baseball Diamond

Posted by Unknown on Saturday, August 23, 2014


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Job Market |How to Polish a Baseball Diamond



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Job Market | Vocations: The Baseball Groundskeeper





Mr. Yoder, director of field operations for the San Diego Padres, says his job involves both art and science. Sam Hodgson for The New York Times




Luke Yoder, 42, is director of field operations for the San Diego Padres.


Q. How long have you been in the landscape business?


A. If you include my neighborhood lawn-cutting business, since 1984. I grew up in South Carolina. My parents stopped my allowance when I was 10, so I started cutting our lawn for money and branched out. In high school, I bought a riding mower and was mowing 12 lawns a week.


When my uncle suggested that I study horticulture since I liked being outside, a light bulb went off over my head. I never knew you could take lawn maintenance to that level.


Was it easy to enter this field (so to speak)?


I studied horticultural turf grass management at Clemson University in South Carolina. At the time, most students in this major planned to work for golf courses. But after graduating, I got a job as head groundskeeper for the Sioux City Explorers in Iowa. When I moved to the Iowa Cubs, and then the Pittsburgh Pirates, I realized that I could have a career in this industry. I’ve been with the Padres for 11 years.


What’s involved in turf grass management?


Art, relating to the design and aesthetics of the field, and science. My classes included chemistry and biology, plant pathology, ornamental plant diseases, and general and special entomology. Grubs and webworms can be a problem in the summer, and you have to understand their life stages so you can prevent or control them. Disease can kill 30 percent of a field in 24 hours. That would not make for a long career. I also maintain the skinned, or dirt, areas of the ball field, where 70 percent of the game is played. These areas present safety issues, such as the edge where the grass and the dirt meet.


You also helped build or renovate fields at the Padres’ baseball academy in the Dominican Republic. What was that like?


The first time I visited, in 2005, there was a cow grazing in the outfield, and a worker was bent over, edging the path between the bases with a machete. When we unpacked the John Deere equipment for the new field, their eyes lit up like a little kid’s at Christmas. When we showed them that by using the tractor they’d no longer have to rake the field by hand to dethatch it, they were extremely happy. The man with the machete smiled all day when he started using the mechanical edger.




Vocations asks people about their jobs. Interview conducted and condensed by Patricia R. Olsen.



A version of this article appears in print on August 24, 2014, on page BU8 of the New York edition with the headline: How to Polish a Diamond.




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