Visiting a baseball field might bring back childhood memories or remind you of your dreams of becoming a professional baseball player. A lot of work goes into ensuring the baseball field is well-maintained and ready for play at any time. To help you maintain a baseball field, here’s how to do it correctly according to experts.
Rake and Drag it Correctly and Often
Proper raking and dragging ensures you do not have grass growing on an infield edge. It also ensures the skinned areas are smooth to ensure playability, eliminate hazards and prevent divots in the clay. Divots and ruts can develop in the clay if the field is used regularly. In addition to being unsightly, they can also contribute to serious injuries during gameplay. For these reasons, you should always drag and rake a baseball field after every game, practice, and use.
Many professionals say you should use handheld tools instead of motorized field drags because the former do a much better job and give you better control. Regardless, you can pick whichever works best for you from the two options. When dragging, it is best to stay about half a foot away from the edge of the grass. Doing so ensures infield material does not get dragged outwards.
Protect the Surface Using Field Tarps
Baseball field tarps are essential for any baseball field because they protect it from excessive moisture, snow, and rain. They are typically made of high-quality polyethylene or vinyl material and cover the whole playing surface or parts of it. Because baseball tarps prevent water accumulation, they help ensure the field remains in optimal condition, thereby ensuring player safety and surface playability.
Whether you need to protect a local baseball diamond or a professional baseball field, reliable and affordable baseball field tarps preserve a field’s integrity and provide a consistent and beautiful surface for players and fans.
Aerate the Field Often
Aeration is vital for the healthy growth of the grass on the field. It frees up compact soil to allow water and oxygen to reach the roots, resulting in healthier grass. The time between aerations depends on how hard the soil is. You should aerate a baseball field once every summer if it is not too hard, and twice if it is. You should also take soil samples for testing to know what to expect after the aeration. If the tests show you need to do multiple aerations, it is best to schedule them a month to two months apart.
Maintain the Edges
Maintaining the field’s grass edges is crucial for the safety of players and ensuring smooth field play. Regular edging also prevents a grass lip from forming and keeps the field looking great.
You can use a mechanical edger, scoop shovel, string line, hand loop edger, and leaf rake to keep the edge looking sharp. Start by edging the whole field with the mechanical edger, and then complete the other steps outlined below:
- Use the string to follow the straight edges like the baseline and use that as a guide to get started.
- You can then use a stake to hold the string down along the edges you need to work on and then use an edger to cut the grass outside the perimeter set.
- Follow up with a hand edger to remove any stubborn grass that remains.
- Rake all the debris and then pick it up with a scoop shovel to remove it from the field.
You should do this bi-weekly, and you will find that the amount of edging you have to do will reduce over time.
Maintaining a baseball field ensures player safety, keeps it beautiful, and protects it from being destroyed during a game or practice. Doing this is not that difficult, and maintaining a field regularly ensures you do not have much to do when you eventually get to it.