Groundskeepers Add to Artistry of the Ballfield

David Mellor, the director of grounds for the Red Sox, checks out the baseball highlights on most nights. But he is not entirely interested in seeing the scores or the big plays. He watches for mowing patterns.

On television, he does not follow the flight of a ball arcing from home plate to beyond the outfield wall, but rather the backdrop below the ball. Is the grass cut into patterns of stripes, checkerboards or diamonds? Parallel to the foul lines, or straight from home to center field, or stretching from foul pole to foul pole? Any flourishes — stars, circles, swirls, logos, script?

Baseball parks have long been identified by architectural touches, from arching facades to ivy-covered walls. These days, they are widely recognized by grass, cropped into distinctive, green-hued designs using the everyday tools of mowers, rollers and other grass-bending gadgets.

Fans tuning in to the playoffs, which begin Wednesday, can expect to see 45-foot-wide swaths in a broadly woven pattern at Fenway Park, cross-hatched diamonds at Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park, straightaway outfield stripes at Dodger Stadium, a classic checkerboard at Wrigley Field, and the mingling three-directional outfield lines at Anaheim’s Angel Stadium, among others planned for the postseason.

Such designs adorn and distinguish nearly every major league ballpark these days, but no one takes as keen an interest in mowing patterns as Mellor. He has written a book on the subject (“Picture Perfect: Mowing Techniques for Lawns, Landscapes, and Sports” -- available at the Lawn & Landscape online store), and is generally considered the top grass-cutting artist in the game. High-school geometry classes visit him at Fenway Park to study ways that an odd-shaped field can be divided and subdivided by straight lines and sharp angles.

“I’m not looking for more work,” Mellor said on a recent afternoon at Fenway Park. “But the grass has to be mowed anyway. So why not do it well, with straight lines, or checkerboards, or something more festive?”

Mellor, 45, gets most of the credit from his groundskeeping cohorts for kick-starting the trend, and forcing countless fans arriving at parks and tuning in to television to wonder: How do they do that?

The concept is simple. The exacting execution is not. Quarter-circle expanses of grass can be wildly out of balance because they are always interrupted by an infield and because of the varying distances to the outfield fences.

Rollers on a mower push the grass slightly forward. Blades bent away from the viewer capture more light and appear relatively pale; when the tips are bent toward the viewer, the grass looks darker. (So grass really can be greener on the other side.) The principle is nothing new to anyone who has run a vacuum back and forth on plush carpet or rubbed a hand over a velvet swatch.

The color palette is not wide, but three distinct shades of green can be created — light, dark and, by mowing across those stripes, something in between.

“Mowers have been making patterns since 1830, when the first mowers were built,” Mellor said.

He was an assistant groundskeeper at Milwaukee County Stadium in 1993 when a concert badly damaged the grass in the outfield. With the support of the head groundskeeper Gary Vanden Berg, Mellor mowed a busy pattern to serve as camouflage. The design, not the damage, was all anyone noticed.

“I still think that was the coolest pattern he ever made,” Vanden Berg said.

Mellor found himself with a niche, and others followed. The striping side effect of mowing has been creatively rearranged into pop art. With few exceptions — one is San Francisco’s AT&T Park, where all the grass is usually mowed in a single direction to keep the slate clean and old-fashioned looking — baseball is played atop an increasingly busy backdrop.

Groundskeepers armed with reel mowers of varying widths create lines and shapes. Intricate designs, like the two-sock Red Sox logo that Mellor has used to festoon Fenway’s grass, can be drawn by rollers, brooms or a stiff stream of water.

“Dave deserves all the credit for setting this trend and really introducing these new wrinkles into the aesthetics,” said the Dodgers’ groundskeeper, Eric Hansen, adding that the trend is not slowing.

“I see it with young groundskeepers,” Hansen said. “They’re really into it.”

Mellor was hired by the Red Sox in 2001, and turned Fenway Park’s grass into baseball’s most interesting canvas. Like other groundskeepers, he and his crew mow every day (usually to one and an eighth inches, sometimes one and a quarter), a task that takes up to three people anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 ½ hours. He changes patterns roughly every homestand to prevent grass from permanently leaning in one direction. All groundskeepers constantly worry about “snaking,” where a ball rolling in the outfield veers because of the grain of the grass.

“Safety and playability are always my first priority,” Mellor said, a mantra he repeats frequently.

Mike Boekholder, the head groundskeeper for the Phillies, etches camera-friendly patterns like diamonds and checks at Citizens Bank Ballpark.

“It’s completely an aesthetic issue,” he said. “It’s never going to enhance the play on the field.”

Mellor stepped into the afternoon at Fenway Park last week through a portal on the third-base side — “Literally, every day I walk out here I get goosebumps,” he said — and looked at the 45-foot-wide swaths (half the distance between bases) that had been cut parallel to the first-base line.

The next day, broad strips were mowed diagonally to those lines, including one running from home plate to center field. On the third day, the cuts went parallel to the third-base line.

That pattern, large blocks and right triangles, likely will be kept for the playoffs. But Mellor did not sound entirely sure. The walls of his office held framed photographs of fields he had decorated with more intricate patterns and flourishes.

Ideas are hatched from unusual places and usually drawn on paper or in the stadium dirt. One of his favorites, a squiggly sunburst, was created by his daughter with crayons.

“Like this,” Mellor said, reaching for the collar of a shirt with stripes of various widths and shades that just happened to be green. “This could make an interesting mowing pattern.”