Moving earth and heaven
Moving earth and heaven
Felix Clutson
Well, the A’s days in California aren’t quite over, but the streets and silence of East Oakland sure shout their absence.
In that long goodbye to the Coliseum in September 2024, one of the most enduring images was that of the ground crew, armed with shovels, walking along the baselines. They were collecting soil from the infield, and pouring a little into outstretched hands, bags, and bottles. As memorialising practice of place, it doesn’t really get any more rooted than the physical collection of it.
The hallowed dirt
Let’s be very clear, baseball dirt is special. And nowhere is that more obvious than… London. Obviously.
To play in the MLB London Series, the teams travel thousands of miles, across oceans and tectonic plates, swapping the dense mix of glacial US geology, for London’s plastic marine clay. But actually, when Tommy Edman, then a Cardinal, slid in to steal second in the 2023 series, it would have felt almost exactly like it did in Busch Stadium…and that’s because it might as well have been.
To ensure the players aren’t eating dirt, MLB wants to make sure that the infields are up to snuff for all their international games. Considering the ironically glacial pace of the drainage in London’s clay, it’s understandable they wouldn’t be so keen on using the local stuff, especially considering our climactic reputation, even in June.
For that reason, they import the entire infield, in the form of the standardised mixture that is used in most ballparks in the majors. West Ham United’s London Stadium (no, inexplicably, MLB doesn’t utilise the bubble machines which serenade the players for their Premier League matches) is completely transformed under thousands of tons of local soil and synthetic turf, before the infield arrives… on a ship. Unequivocally, soil matters.
An even wilder example of the need for particular particulates actually relates to Long Island. In 2024, the USA hosted the Cricket World Cup, and with the sport’s popularity in the Asian sub-continent and New York’s large diasporic populations, they were desperate to host some games in the Big Apple.
Their first idea was, of course, the most historic baseball facility in the Bronx.
Er. No, it’s Van Cortlandt Park. What did you think I was going to say?
A New York name steeped in (colonial) history, Van Cortlandt is perhaps most famous for the eponymous house, the oldest building still standing in the Bronx. The Satchel Paige of New York Georgian. These days, the park’s baseball glories lie in its role as the home of Manhattan College, one of the founding members of the MAAC.
Unfortunately for the International Cricket Council (ICC), they found opposition in the high volume of community use of Van Cortlandt, so they were forced to look a bit further afield. Naturally, they ended up building a new temporary stadium in a parking lot in East Meadow, Long Island. But cricket also needs special dirt, very special dirt, so this is where things get tricky.
In essence, it needs to be a bit harder than the ballpark, to allow for cricket’s cork ball to bounce. In purpose-built venues, it is usually prepared in situ. For a variety of reasons, including late decision-making about venues, this was not an option, despite Gotham’s long and rich cricketing tradition. Indeed, the first ever international cricket match was played in New York, in 1844, between the United States and Canada.
Another problem— you need to be able to grow grass on a cricket pitch, and the New York winters (of Simon and Garfunkel fame), are not so keen on you doing that. So, they came up with the only logical solution: play the games somewhere warmer, with pre-existing infrastructure where they could prepare on-site?
Oh. No, actually, that would have been a good idea. Obviously, the answer lay… 10,000 miles away in South Australia.
In Oz, they play cricket in the summer, on the same grounds which host Aussie rules football in the winter. And before the turn of the century, having a big, bare strip of earth in the middle of the field was, frankly, sub-optimal. So, in the 1990s, the Melbourne Cricket Ground developed a system of a ‘drop-in pitch’, which could be craned in and out. In essence, they cut a slot in the middle of the ground, and can fill it with trays of earth for cricket, or bits of synthetic turf for other sports. Following these early innovations, it was the crew at the Adelaide Oval who got down and dirt-y (cough), experimenting with the local soil and clay, and developed into the world leaders at constructing the big trays that became drop-in pitches.
It turns out, for cricket, South Australian clay is pretty swell. Shrink-swell, actually. It doesn’t simply embrace the water like London does, it swells when wet but dries out and shrinks again, forming cracks on the surface. Now, through some sort of earth magic, these cracks allow the pitch to breathe, to naturally shift under pressure, while maintaining stability – allowing for nice, firm bounce.
So, surreally, at the start of the Aussie summer in 2023, somewhere in a southern clay pit, the first excavations of our New York pitch took place. The clay was prepared with standard cricket alchemy in steel trays in Adelaide, before being shipped to a turf farm near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, because it turns out that, as well as in New York, you also can’t grow grass on a boat.
Then they did what we all do over the winter. They were rolled. They were watered. They matured. Then in the Spring, they were picked up and put on flatbed trucks and driven to New York.
Now, after that odyssey, it turned out the pitch wasn’t actually very good – but frankly, I’m not surprised. If I were some clay from the Antipodes, I’d be absolutely knackered after all that as well.
The point is that there is an essence of the game, of the very nature of what constitutes the sport, written in the clods and the clumps, imprinted in the chunks and the chips. Importance in the physical characteristics of the ground we stand on, means that some fundamental part of the sport is physically embodied in the dirt itself. And this becomes even clearer, when you’re willing to send it halfway round the world to play a game. Let’s just hope, after all of that chaos, you don’t, I dunno, get bowled out for 77 (Sri Lanka), or give up nearly thirty runs over two games (Red Sox).
Soul(t) of the earth
So, soil solidly sits in the scientific soul of the sport.
Without it, it is unrooted. It cannot function in its true form. But why on earth (pun intended) do people in Oakland, and beyond, have little jars of it on their shelves?
Well, it’s where the magic happens isn’t it? The drama, the sprints for home, the sizzling strikeouts – it’s all in the dirt. In your hands at the Coliseum, you could actually hold a physical echo of Reggie Jackson charging for home, or Rickey Henderson, kicking up dust, sliding into second. The collection of the earth offers a rare combination, which connects us simultaneously to this special place, but also the physical drama of the sport itself. Sacred relics, they also bring us closer to those nostalgic traditions, playing in fields as kids, the land, the earth from which we came.
Perhaps the most compelling example of this collecting ritual, lies in Japan, during Koshien, the national high school baseball competition. There, every game is nationally televised, with schools who won their regional tournaments representing their prefecture. Not only is it incredibly popular, but carries with it ideas of youthful hope, perseverance, collective identity, and regional pride.
Reaching the finals at the Koshien stadium in Nishinomiya is incredible in itself. Out of 4,000 teams, only 49 make it. This, alone, makes the stadium a special place, a dream. There, on the sacred ground, the losers of each game engage in what is seen as an iconic ritual, scooping up the famously dark infield dirt as a memento. Collecting the soil represents the sweat, the perseverance, and the great success of making it to the stadium. For almost all of them, Koshien also marks the end of their time as a school baseball player, for most their last moments playing competitively ever. It becomes a memorial to youth, to camaraderie, and the experiences they have shared with their teammates.
Koshien started in 1915, and aside from a hiatus during the Second World War (1942-45), it has been staged every year since. Except 2020, when the COVID pandemic was turning the world upside down. For thousands, this was tough news, potentially the pinnacle of their years at school stripped away, at a time when some positivity would have been most welcome.
So, Hanshin Tigers, the famous pro team, who play their home games at the same stadium, decided to make a gesture of solidarity. They sent out small packets of dirt from the Koshien infield, to 50,000 high school players across the country. In those small envelopes was not only a place, but a piece of collective culture, memory, and rite of passage. While there was a physical absence of the tournament, its spirit could still be shared.
What’s that? No, I’m not crying, I just have some dirt from the ballpark in my eye.
Felix Clutson is from a town called Reading, in the UK. His bat and ball education began when his family bought their first television as a child in the mid-nineties, so that they could watch ‘Tintin’ cartoons, and the great West Indies cricket team tour England. It was in that series, amidst a flood of Brian Lara runs, that Dominic Cork famously took the first Test hat-trick by an Englishman since the 1950s. He is currently on the final straight of a PhD in Translation Studies at the University of Surrey in England, where he is exploring the nature of cultural identity in football club museums. Interested in many sports, his main focus is on tensions between locality and globality, memories of place, and community representation.
Jeff Brain is a San Francisco-based baseball artist and poet. He was a featured poet at the first two National Baseball Poetry Festivals, and now serves on the Poets Committee of the NBPF held each May in Worcester, MA.
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