Its crazy to think about it if you came to baseball in the 70s and early 80s, but now there are only two parks in Major League Baseball with artificial turf: Rogers Centre in Toronto and Tropicana Field in St. Pete. Within a few years there will be only one.
From the Globe and Mail, news that the CFL’s Argonauts -- the biggest reason they keep turf in Rogers Centre -- are going to be out of the joint by 2018 at the latest, and that it seems like the Jays are going to put grass on the field. It’ll be hard, but not impossible:
“Nothing’s impossible. Everything can be engineered … but it’s not as simple as trucking in dirt and laying sod down,” said Steve Schiedel, vice-president of Greenhorizons Group of Farms Ltd., a Cambridge, Ont.-based company that installed a temporary grass field in Rogers Centre during the summer of 2010, for a pair of soccer matches. Because Rogers Centre is surrounded symmetrically by high walls to support the retractable roof, special lighting may be required to stimulate grass growth. But the biggest hurdle is lack of drainage.
For that they’ll dig up the concrete below and add a drainage system. Then: grass. Hopefully.
