FIELD OF THE YEAR PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL
SportsField Management ( SFM ): What stands out most about the winning field ?
Eric Taylor : At the start of 2020 , we were getting ready for a normal year . Once March hit , we could see the writing on the wall , and knew we weren ’ t going to start on time . We made a departmental decision that we still needed to get the field ready , because , at any moment , we needed to be ready to play the game of baseball . We kept going about our business , taking care of the dirt , edging , building the mound , etc . We held off on laser grading , because we decided that once we knew we were going to play , we would have 17 days , and we could laser grade during those days . But we didn ’ t want to re-grade the skin and have that money out there , because we didn ’ t know what was going to happen .
In March they furloughed people . I lost my three guys , my interns and my part-time guy . They ended up going on unemployment on the furlough program . I was alone for the first month .
Once we realized that a Minor League season might not happen at all , we went back to the drawing board to see what the city and state would allow us to do . So we decided to create a high school baseball league — mostly for the seniors . We had a stadium and we had a city that said we could hold an event if we followed the protocols ( masks , hand sanitizer , cleaning between games ). I wanted to do it because I know what it was like as a senior to play . At that point , we only had eight people in our front office . I oversee four stadiums for Boyd Sports ( Tennessee Smokies , Greeneville Reds , Johnson City Cardinals , and the Elizabethton Twins ). We got the okay to do it , but Greeneville was out . We figured we could get in three games per day , but we would have to start at 2:30 . I was getting there around 5:30 in the morning , and would mow , take care of the dirt , repack the mound , repack the plate . We would repack bullpens , so we would cut corners on those , but we had to because we didn ’ t know how much money we would have coming in .
As it went on , I was able to bring on one person , Steven Eason . He would get there about 8:30 , we would wave at each other . He knew he had a few things to do and he would do them as quickly as possible and either get out of there or give me a hand with other things . There were times where we would go four days without speaking with each other . He knew what he had to do . I had one intern from The University of Tennessee ( Nick Ogara ) who would come in to water and chalk . As the year rolled on , we found our niche and we would barely scrape by . We cut our fertility program back by at least 60 percent for the entire year .
At Smokies Stadium we ended up playing 317 games for the entire year , but we played 300 of those games from June 1 through October 31 . ( Combined across all three stadiums , we hosted 812 games total – with 495 games combined at the other two stadiums in Johnson City and Elizabethton ).
There was no additional game day help . It was just us and our front office personnel . We would come in , take care of the field , chalk it , and by 1:30 teams would start rolling in . Once the game got started , I would run scoreboard . We would keep full stats on these guys . We would score it as we scored a Minor League game . Our front office helped run concessions . sportsfieldmanagementonline . com March 2021 | SportsField Management
11