A laminated piece of yellow paper hangs on the side of the LSU dugout, giving a brief sentence of encouragement to the Alex Box Stadium grounds crew.
“Rake like a champion today.”
Eric Fasbender hung the variation of the Notre Dame board in 2009 as a way to encourage his crew to perform better.
“We had a couple guys that were less than motivated early in the season,” said Fasbender, the assistant director of
athletic facilities and grounds. “I wanted to pick something out that would get them more motivated. We had it up the whole season, and they ended up winning the national championship.”
The sign stays partly because of superstition, Fasbender said, a way of bringing good fortune to the team. But that luck hasn’t carried over to the grounds crew, which has dealt with threats of rain in almost every game this season.
The game against Notre Dame on March 12 was canceled because of rain, and a storm delayed the March 28 game against
Louisiana-Lafayette by one hour, 17 minutes.
“It wrecked me,” Fasbender said of the ULL game. “We had about 80 guys pulling the tarp, and we barely made it on. Before that game we were in the clear, and it just popped up on us.”
Fasbender said he consults with LSU coach Paul Mainieri and event manager David Taylor before every game to determine if it must be canceled due to weather. But once the game starts, the decision to call a rain delay falls on the umpires.
“The field can take a lot,” Fasbender said. “But once the game starts, it’s the umpire’s call. Thankfully a lot of our umpires look to us.”
Fasbender said the field has sand-based turf, which drains quickly and allows standing puddles to disappear in seconds. But when it does rain during a game, Fasbender turns to the assistance of the “turf crew,” which is made up of student volunteers.
Political communications junior Tristan Gruspier said the group started in 2009, when Fasbender called upon Air Force ROTC cadets to assist with pulling the tarp over the infield during rain delays. Gruspier, a former cadet, has served on the crew for three years and said it has drifted away from the ROTC into a group of students simply looking to help out.
“It worked out to be that a bunch of my friends got together,” Gruspier said. “I asked a couple guys, and they asked a couple guys, and now we have the eight guys that we have today.”
The crew typically arrives an hour and a half before game time and assists the grounds crew in moving batting cages, painting lines and raking the infield before, during and after games.
The grounds crew must prep the field for afternoon practices in time for players to use the field up to five hours before games.
“One thing people don’t understand about baseball field maintenance is the amount of time that gets spent to make sure the field is in really good condition,” Fasbender said.
For the rest of the grounds crew, tending the field at Alex Box
Stadium is a full-time job. Randy Partin, who spends more than 40 hours a week on field maintenance, said he typically arrives at the stadium at 7 a.m. every day.
Some of Partin’s duties include mowing the field daily, which gives him the opportunity to create the designs mowed into the field.
“It’s just the direction that we mow,” Partin said. “It lays the grass down a certain way. It’s the light reflection off that particular side of the grass that you see.”
This season, the field has sported designs like the “vortex” and “sunburst.” For the Tigers’ next home stand, Partin said he will go with the “checkerboard.”
“That’s probably my favorite design,” he said. “It’s simple, but it’s detailed and clean.”
 
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Contact Hunter Paniagua at [email protected]