When Chris Tillman throws the first pitch Thursday to start the ALDS, it will have been 11 full days since Oriole Park at Camden Yards hosted a baseball game. That's more than enough time -- almost too much time -- for Nicole McFadyen, the team's head groundskeeper, to get the field into pristine shape.
"We're making sure everything is set and ready to go, so we can provide a fair and safe playing surface for the athletes," said McFadyen, one of only two women head groundskeepers in Major League Baseball and one of the few in all of pro sports. (Ironically, the other is Heather Nabozny, who works for the Detroit Tigers, Baltimore's opponent in this round.)
Unlike two seasons ago, when the Orioles went on the road to defeat the Rangers in the American League wild-card game and sparked a firestorm of activity at Camden Yards, this year's pace has been more methodical. The checklist she brought out to the field -- Kentucky bluegrass, if you're wondering -- every day since the O's left town on Sept. 21 for their final road trip shows the wear of almost two weeks of being stuffed into a jacket pocket, snapped onto a clipboard and smoothed out again on a desk at the end of the day. "It's a long time to wait for such an exciting time for our team and our city. I'm not really stressed out, I just want everything to be as perfect as we can possibly help make it," McFadyen said.
Here's a taste of what McFadyen and her crew have been working on to get ready for Thursday's opening ALDS game: Main mound? Sloped perfectly.
Warning track? Smooth like a baby's butt.
Divots? Patched better than even a caddy at Augusta National could.
Bullpen chains? Strong as ever.
Pattern? The crisscross in the infield grass and the lines in the outfield could elicit tears from a geometry teacher.
L-screens? The BP pitchers will never be safer from line drives.
But the final touch for the field, after the watering, raking, tamping and measuring (even the 90 feet between bases will be double-checked) was the MLB-issued logo that screams "POSTSEASON" stretching for about 50 feet in foul territory along the first- and third-base lines.
It's kind of like decorating the house for a big holiday, where everything is ready, but you're just waiting for that last element. Except most people's homes don't accommodate almost 46,000 guests.
The 18th task on McFadyen's list was finally completed late Tuesday night with an assist from Don Follett and Sean Kauffman -- leaders of the Baltimore Ravens grounds crew -- who regularly paint the end zones just a block away.
It starts by measuring the coordinates and then tacking down a plastic template provided by MLB. Using a letter-sized printout of the logo as a key, McFadyen directed Follett and Kauffman on which colors to apply to which sections of the stencil. Eventually a guideline was created on the field, leaving the crew with a "connect-the-dots" style path to completing the field's paint job. That's when Kauffman, eschewing his purple and black for black and orange, got to work. With McFadyen holding the paint machine's hose over her shoulders and Kauffman crouching down to connect each dot, the magic began. With a soundtrack of "thunk-a-thunk" as the paint was sucked from a 5-gallon bucket by an air compressor every time Kauffman squeezed the trigger, what originally looked like a Seurat pointillism painting began to take a more obvious form. Starting with the 6-foot P, Kauffman worked steadily for about 35 minutes, from left to right, until "POSTSEASON" became obvious. McFadyen even climbed atop the Orioles' dugout to take a look, like a parent surveying her living room on Christmas morning before the kids come down and lay waste to the presents. (For a cool look at the process of the logo-painting, click here.)
"I'm excited, it is kind of like waiting for Christmas," she said of her playoff anticipation. "We want our ballpark and our city to shine just as much as we want our team to play some great games here."
While McFadyen is a veteran of playoff baseball, stemming from Baltimore's two home ALDS games against the Yankees two seasons ago, there is one big difference for her this time around. In 2012 she was three months pregnant. Now she's the mother of a 17-month-old boy.
"I think the hormones from being pregnant helped me get through the stress of those playoffs," she said. "Your body knows you're trying to sustain a life so I felt more relaxed than I do right now."
In 2012, it was about as stressful as it gets for a head groundskeeper. Game 1 and Game 2 that year were delayed by rain.
"You want to get the game started, but there are a lot of things at hand you have to factor in. Is it safe to play in this kind of rain? You have to think of the fans and food and beverage sales, and you want to make sure that everyone gets the experience of a playoff game. ... We ended up getting both games underway so everything worked out. Having that sense of calmness from being pregnant allowed me to not stress out [in front of other people]. It's a lot to handle."
McFadyen's degree in agriculture from the University of Delaware included classes on turf management and plant genetics, but nobody ever taught her how to work on the infield dirt, or "skin," as groundskeepers call it. She learned that skill at the beginning of her career working in the minor leagues. Day in and day out, that is perhaps the most challenging aspect of her job. But October baseball always brings with it the threat of rain. And that means the tarp always has to be ready.
The tarp, however, is perhaps the most dangerous and unpredictable element of a baseball groundskeeper's job. (Just ask Vince Coleman, who missed the 1985 World Series due to a tarp-related injury.) Nabozny is just now back on the job after tearing her patellar tendon when she landed on her knee during a tarp mishap on Sept. 5.
"People don't realize, but when you get those winds, you're talking about a third of an acre of plastic, and when the wind catches up underneath, it's like a sail. It's dangerous," Nabozny said during a break from preparing the field at Comerica Park for Games 3 and 4 of the Orioles-Tigers series. "The tarp started blowing back as we were rolling it out, so I ran to help get the tarp, and it ended up blowing up and I went flying off. I got knocked up in the air and then down. I don't think I went real high, but it's a freaky thing where I landed just right on my kneecap and it ruptured the tendon."
Nabozny had surgery and is looking forward to the playoffs. There have been plenty of postseason games in Detroit during the Tigers' recent swing of good fortune, and unlike the regular season when many MLB parks play host to corporate outings and concerts such as Jimmy Buffett, Rihanna and One Direction, October is all about baseball.
"The playoffs are just baseball. I love to do that," Nabozny said. "There's no fireworks or 'kids run the bases.' All those extra things that can damage the field and are more of a customer service thing, the playoffs are just baseball. We can just focus on preparing the field."
And of course, the postseason is a reward for all those 14-hour days that often begin in March and last until November, regardless of the team's fortune.
"I hope we get here year after year," said McFadyen, whose son comes to the park every once in a while with his toy lawn mower. "It makes all those hard days, all those long nights, all those crazy situations we deal with and sacrifices from family and friends -- if you make it to the postseason, it makes all of that even more worth it."
