ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 3, 1997 TAG: 9704040002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE THE ROANOKE TIMES
THE PITCHER'S mound is damp. The infield needs leveling. And those dips in the outfield will have to be filled in.
It is early springtime - three weeks before the Salem Avalanche opens its 1997 season against the Durham Bulls.
And here at Memorial Stadium, Stan Macko already is sweating the details.
"Whatever I have to do, it'll be ready," vowed Macko - who isn't the league's top groundskeeper for nothing.
Macko - who Carolina League managers named best stadium groundskeeper in 1996, the first full season that Salem's sparkling new stadium was in use - is an office worker in the off-season.
Each fall, he trades in his high-top tennis shoes and cut-offs for a coat and tie, and becomes a sales rep for the Avalanche.
But come spring, Macko, like Superman, sheds the disguise and prepares for rougher work.
And a good thing, too. Macko, a 6-foot 6-inch ex-basketball player from Binghamton, N.Y., may not be the top man on the snow slope for the Avalanche, the Class A minor league franchise of the big league's Colorado Rockies. Far from it.
But as groundskeeper, Macko is the Avalanche's foundation. Its linchpin. Its keystone. Its lodestar. Its rock.
"He's a mudder," grins Avalanche General Manager Dave Oster.
Pick your own metaphor. The truth is, much about the Avalanche begins with Macko.
Without his 15-hour days in summertime, that emerald setting that so bedazzles fans inside the city's $10 million ballpark would fade. That glossy outfield would turn brown and lumpy. Those smooth base lines would be ankle-turning swales. And that handsome imported New Jersey clay mound the pitchers stand on would be slimy muck.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
But it is Macko who (with a little help) applies the polish that makes this gem shine.
He didn't exactly plan it this way.
In fact, when he got out of Cortland State College in New York a few years back, Macko hadn't exactly planned anything. A physical education major at Cortland State, he went to Ohio to stay with a relative for awhile, and worked for a minor league baseball club there, the Canton-Akron Indians.
The job interested him enough that he went to the league's annual meeting and job fair that winter.
There, he linked up with the old Buccaneers - and headed for Salem to learn about grass and clay and lime at aged Municipal Field in 1994.
The old field had its charms, of course.
But from a groundskeeper's point of view there is no comparison between the city's former ballpark and its current one. "That other place had years of abuse before I got there," said Macko, 26. "A lot of low spots. A lot of uneven spaces."
And then, the old park was stuck in a smallish rectangle, making the field itself cramped and asymmetrical. The new field is at least 25 feet longer, Macko said, and has the lovely fan-like shape of a groundskeeper's dreams.
"They're always talking about Durham," said Macko, of the $16 million home of the Durham Bulls. Although he has never been there, Macko said, "I don't see how it can be better than this."
Of course, a good groundskeeper at a minor league ballpark needs a healthy dose of hometown pride.
And Macko, who often puts in 100-hour weeks in the summertime, sometimes runs on little else.
"You don't get paid a lot. You put in some serious hours. If you don't have any pride," he said, "you're not going to do it."
Of winning the league's Groundskeeper of the Year award last season, Macko said "It felt good. Real good. It's a nice validation."
Indeed, in some ways, Macko's job is an exercise in frustration.
After all, he works such long hours trying to make the field look postcard perfect - only to watch 18 men tear it up at night.
And not just at night.
"You know what tears the field up most?" asked Macko. "Batting practice. It just gets beat to hell."
Macko said he used to get upset when he saw the field he had labored on all day get torn apart at night. But he realizes, he said, that the players are only trying to do their best.
Three weeks before opening day, with the players still in spring training in Tucson, Ariz., his concerns are different. Macko battles not wear and tear from dozens from pairs of cleats, but the corrosive work of Mother Nature.
Macko tallied off the chores to be done before the season's first pitch: add dirt to the infield, and break the hard spots up. Fill those dips in the outfield with sand, and scatter some grass seed on top. There is nothing, after all, like a sudden dip in the field to make a ball go flying over an outfielder's glove.
"Every time I see a bad bounce," Macko said, "I kind of panic."
Macko also must prepare the pitcher's mound - a job involving both precision and a kind of artist's intuition, moulding the special clay to a peak of exactly 10 inches and rounding it in a slow, sensual curve down to the grass.
A lawn care company, Green Up, handles the health of the grass itself. But to Macko falls the edging, and the mowing. The field must be mowed daily during a home stand, he said, and every other day when the team is out of town.
According to Oster, the general manager, Macko takes a proprietary interest in his work. "He considers it his field. He takes offense at people tearing up the grass. He takes great pride in what he does out there."
Jeff Banister, on-the-field manager for the Lynchburg Hillcats, said Salem's field was the best they played on all year in '96 - Durham's included. He said that was especially impressive since new fields tend to have new sod that hasn't yet taken root, thus making the footing treacherous. "You could not tell any of that last year" in Salem, Banister said. "It must have been hard."
Meanwhile, Bill McGuire, field manager for the Avalanche, praised Macko for never letting the little things slide by.
McGuire sometimes calls 9:30 a.m. practices after night games, he said - in which case Macko, in order to repair the game's wear and tear, will have to be on the field well before that.
Not that McGuire cares.
"I try to tell him, 'Hey, don't worry about it, it's all right like it is.' But he won't go for that. He does an outstanding job."
He may not do it forever.
As a long-term career, Macko conceded, groundskeeping has some disadvantages.
"Your summer's shot," he said. "And the hours are relentless." When the Avalanche is in town for a week-long home stretch, Macko works from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., seven days in a row.
He worries, too about the impact of all that summer sunlight on his fair skin, the sun block notwithstanding.
Of course, he could always move up.
Not that he dreams about working in the major leagues, exactly. "If it happens, it happens," he said.
Still, Macko, who does much of the groundskeeping work in Salem by himself, once attended a major league game in Cleveland - and got a glimpse of how they do it in the big time.
No overwork there, it seems.
"They had 13 guys holding a hose, watering the field," said Macko, still amazed.
The Salem Avalanche opens its 1997 season Friday night against the Durham Bulls.
LENGTH: Long : 141 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON/THE ROANOKE TIMES. 1. Stan Macko wasby CNBvoted the Carolina League's groundskeeper of the year last season.
2. During baseball season, he logs 15-hour days tending to such
tasks as straightening home plate (below) and preparing the infield.
color.