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Being on a baseball team’s grounds crew is never fun. You have to put in a ton of work – usually in really hot weather – to make a baseball field playable. You have to run on the field in between innings to clean things up, and during hazardous conditions such as rain storms, you have to rush to make sure that the field isn’t turned into a gigantic puddle of mud. It’s never-ending.
Speaking as someone who used to work for a baseball team, the latter duty is especially brutal. Making sure that tarp gets on the field quickly while rain is pouring down on you is one of the hardest things in the world.
Unfortunately for this poor Kansas City grounds crew member, he learned that the hard way on Thursday night. During the rain delay in the third inning of Game 1 between the Royals and the Houston Astros, the Kansas City crew raced onto the field and tried its hardest to make sure the field didn’t get sopping wet. This guy ran out a little too quickly, which led to him to lose his footing and get swallowed up by the gigantic tarp he was trying to drag out.
The good news is the Royals know how to deal with something like this. As Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports points out, a similar incident happened four years ago, in which another Royals groundskeeper got tarp’d.
While it’s nice to have experience in handling things like this as they occur, we’d like to hope that nobody gets swallowed up by the tarp again.
