Name: Why Most Major League Baseball Teams Import Clay From Pennsylvania
Uploaded: 2023-08-31T09:30:00Z
Duration: 6 min 41 s
Description: Out of the 30 Major League Baseball teams, 26 source their infield mix from a single business in Pennsylvania, thanks to one specific ingredient: Pittsburgh red bed clay. Here’s how it gets from Pittsburgh to around the country. Photo composite: Destin DeMarion for The Wall Street Journal

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Out of the 30 Major League Baseball teams, 26 source their infield mix from a single business in Pennsylvania, thanks to one specific ingredient: Pittsburgh red bed clay. Here’s how it gets from Pittsburgh to around the country. Photo composite: Destin DeMarion for The Wall Street Journal

https://m.wsj.net/video/20231009/3089c3ec-e2df-4e26-bf1a-a19f10cf5f9e/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Why Most Major League Baseball Teams Import Clay From Pennsylvania

Narrator: Of the 30 Major League baseball teams 26 have infield mixes sourced from here.

All right, so this is what we're after, the beginnings of a baseball field. All the hard work, crushing rock, all for this, right here.

Narrator: This right here is Pittsburgh red bed. And this clay stone is unique in how it reacts to one key element, water.

For the owners of the teams it's about playing in the rain. You equate it to monetizing what the cost of the infield was versus playing a game in the rain.

Water's very important because it absorbs the ball bounce, almost like corkboard.

Narrator: But just getting to the clay can take two months. Here's how a single dirt farm takes all of this to turn into this. It all starts here. 300 million years ago, sediment from eroding mountains deposited this unique rock unit called the Glenshaw Formation and the Pittsburgh red bed is hidden within it.

Grant: We have to remove all of the overburden above it, the sandstone, the gray shale, and then a limestone layer that's about a foot thick at the bottom.

Narrator: The overburden becomes thicker at higher elevations. So DuraEdge products can only mine for the clay here. Otherwise,

It's cost prohibitive to mine the clay because you have too much overburden to take off the top, it would cost too much money.

Narrator: Pittsburgh red bed is predominantly made up of illite and kaolinite, two clay minerals that can absorb water without swelling and dissipate the water quickly.

As you can see, this material is very densely packed so we have to take it up to the plant and crush it to make it a usable product for baseball fields.

Narrator: Over the course of a year, excavators will mine and then load approximately 30,000 tons of the clay into these trucks, driving it all to a processing facility an hour away.

The challenge to this business is taking something that's this hard, compressed in the ground and then ultimately we want to get it into that powder. We wanna mill it into something like talcum powder.

Narrator: The clay is pre-crushed with a bulldozer, then reduced down to an inch and a half thanks to this bucket.

It's got hammers on the inside and teeth that grab the clay and physically smash it.

Narrator: Finally, the clay is pushed through a REMco crusher.

Grant: It's a vertical shaft impact crusher, and it spins at 1800 RPMs. Between that bucket and that crusher, it's made the product perform so much better.

Narrator: But transforming the clay into infield mix requires a specific proportion of clay, silt, and sand.

The sand creates void space. The silt and clay fill the void space when it's in the proper ratio, and that requires the use of a pug mill, which is back here behind us. So what happens when you put it through the pug mill, you build friction inside the mixer and when you grind the two products together the clay will actually adhere into the sand and it comes out as one single homogenous mix.

Narrator: The company creates three types of infield mix that vary in proportions. Professional grade infield mix has less sand and more clay content, which helps retain moisture better but also requires more maintenance.

This is a finished product. Once you smooth it off you can tell if there's anything in there, if the sand's too fine, I can tell it won't hold together quite as well. If the sand's too coarse, the coarse particles will stick out. When I'm testing my product and I've got the right moisture in it, I can go like this with my product, it'll stay together. You could almost juggle. I don't know how to juggle, but you could you could juggle these balls, right? But then when I, when I drop it on the ground I want that ball to just completely fall apart. So then I'll go like this and I'll pack it down and ultimately, when it's compressed, that's what the surface is gonna look like.

Narrator: Stadiums nearby will have their infield mix delivered from the main processing facility. For stadiums farther away, only the clay is shipped and the infield mix is made at one of DuraEdge's satellite locations saving up to 70% in freight costs.

It cuts down tremendously on logistics costs because if you were to make it all here and ship it to Salt Lake City, you would be shipping five more trucks and the cost of that would be too great. There are some groundskeepers that want things made slightly different, but by and large, we're producing the exact same product for every team.

Narrator: Like at Citi Field.

Citi Field's infield mix is actually very similar to a lot of the other ballparks. Sometimes regionally they differ slightly just based on the weather. That's a big factor for us here is how our infield mix performs in different weather conditions, hot and humid, dry, wet, rainy. We're trying to get it the same every day.

Narrator: Building a Major League baseball infield from scratch requires up to 350 tons of infield mix, which can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $80,000. So many stadiums focus on maintenance, incorporating smaller deliveries into their existing infield as needed.

Bill: What's gonna happen after he's done scarifying is we're gonna add a little bit of material and the laser grader's gonna push the material into all the little low spots and cut from the high spots so that everything's nice and level. He is actually finishing the grade of the infield to within about an eighth of an inch.

Narrator: Infields are required to be graded so that the baselines and the home plates are level. Then a thin layer of top dressing or conditioner is added to help retain moisture and enhance the sliding surface for players.

So this machine right here is the final step. This is a one and a half ton roller and this will pack everything back down when we're done laser grading. After that a little bit of water and we're good to go.

Narrator: The trick is to keep the infield consistent every single game.

When an infield mix isn't good, it'll break apart. So as players are running around it chunks will be coming out of it or if something's acting up then we'll check moisture meter and we have a range that we like to get. It's gonna play well in that range.

Narrator: But groundskeepers can often check the moisture with one simple trick.

If the key goes in and out nice and smoothly then we know that it's where it needs to be. So the key goes in, it has a little bit of force, and then it comes out and there's no chunks. It's nice and clean. Water's very important for an infield because it absorbs the ball bounce. It makes the infield mix pliable and almost like corkboard.

Narrator: Before soil science became standard application in the MLB ballparks teams relied on local suppliers. But groundskeepers say infield dirt then was inconsistent and more difficult to maintain. Competing infield mix suppliers say their products achieve the same purpose without using the specific clay. But after starting with the Philadelphia Phillies in 2005 DuraEdge product supplies most MLB teams today.

It started to get out a bit more around this part of the country that I'm the dirt guy. People are incredibly surprised by the fact that this is where it comes from. And presto whamo, you got infield mix. That's how it works.

This Pennsylvania Dirt Farm Supplies Infield Mix for 86% of MLB Teams

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