The common sentiment seemed to be that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Coors Field could be transformed from a winter wonderland into a pristine, emerald playing field.
Time after time, Rockies head groundskeeper Mark Razum was asked how he and his team did it.
“Yeah, I got that a lot,” Razum said with a laugh an hour before the Rockies hosted the Mets on Wednesday night. “It was a challenge for sure, but we had a plan, and everybody worked together. But we knew we could do it, and that’s always gratifying.”
Manager Warren Schaffer was amazed at the transformation.
“It’s unbelievable,” Schaffer said about 5 p.m. Wednesday. “This is the first time I have been out here in about five hours, and I can’t believe there is not one drop of snow out there. The field is not even wet. It’s insane. I mean, ‘Raz’ is the best in the business.”
The May snowstorm that roared into the Denver area on Tuesday and Wednesday dropped anywhere from 5 inches to 11.5 inches of snow in the metro area. Wednesday’s game was initially scheduled for a 1:10 p.m. first pitch but was pushed back to 7:20 p.m. to give the crew plenty of time to prepare the field. They accomplished that with a couple of hours to spare.
The secret was that ‘Raz’ employed a new game plan for this storm. First, the crew used “snow pushers” — think of snow plows equipped with plastic blades that glide and don’t tear up the grass — to clear snow from the outfield.
“Then, this year, we built, what I call, a roadway out in left-center field near the warning track,” explained Razum, who’s been the caretaker since 1994, a year before the ballpark opened. “That allowed us to push all of the snow onto the runway and use equipment to load the snow and take it away to the parking lot, where we dumped it. We didn’t have to do much hand shoveling and loading like we used to. It worked really well. That saved us a lot of time.”
But that doesn’t mean that Raz’s crew didn’t put in a lot of time and muscle to get the field ready. At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the entire crew of 15 was at Coors, ready to roll.
“Hey, everybody showed up!” Raz kidded. “Nobody called in sick.”
The crew began preparing on Monday when forecasters called for a major spring storm to hit Colorado.
“We put down a compound on the field that made the infield tighter in case we had to play through a rain game or a snow game,” said Collin Reedy, an assistant groundskeeper. “Then Tuesday was full throttle. We started plowing snow last night.”
When the storm first hit at about 5 p.m. on Tuesday, assistant head groundskeeper Doug Zabinsky and assistant groundskeeper Adam Steward took the first shift. About 9:30 p.m., Reedy and Raz did the second plowing and then took another turn about 4:30 a.m. Then Zabinski did the final round after the snow tapered off late Wednesday morning.
The tarp also had to be cleared of snow, removed from the diamond, and the residual water soaked up.
“With a storm like this, you want to remove the snow as it comes, instead of all at once,” Razum said. “That way, it’s not a huge strain on everybody. But you don’t want to go over it too many times because it starts wearing the grass out.”
The Rockies installed new turf at Coors Field during the offseason, the first time the club had done that since after the 2019 season.
As Reedy worked on the infield dirt around home plate, the sun came out in full as Coors the grass shimmered.
“We take a lot of pride in this field,” he said. “She’s definitely beat up in a few places, that can’t be helped. But we’ll give her a lot of love next week when the Rockies are on the road.”
