Home Field Advantage

From the SI archive, a recollection of the exploits of Bossard family, three (and maybe more) generations of groundskeepers:

There. It's safe now. Rog just noticed an itsy-bitsy difference in the shade of the grass near first base. That'll keep him churned up for a while. As long as we're here, let's start with this dirt right in front of home plate. It's critical, Brandon. The first bounce a ground ball takes is the most important one. Back in '48, when I was the Indians' groundskeeper, our infielders had all the range of a grubworm, so I took a pickax, went down a good half-foot, filled in the area around home with loose dirt, turned it into oatmeal with the hose, concealed it with an inch of dry dirt, and guess what? We won the championship with those grubworms, and I took the World Series money the players awarded me and bought a beaut of a brand-new Buick—which I used, I might add, to compact many a minor league and spring training infield.
I was so good at deadening ground balls that when Willie Mays kangaroo-hopped a clutch double over our third baseman's head to win Game 4 of the '54 Series, Joe DiMaggio himself, perched up in the press box, declared, "First time I ever saw that happen to the Bossards. It calls for a congressional investigation."
And good as I was at it, my son Gene—that's your grandpa—here in Chicago might've been better. Back in '67 Geno pulled so many shenanigans that the White Sox, who finished the season with a team batting average of .225 and not a regular player over .241, were tied for first on Sept. 6. They were loaded with sinkerball pitchers, who could roll out of bed on Christmas morning and make a batter roll a ground ball. So Gene and Roger, who was only 18 then, would come out with a pickax and a hose at 2 a.m., when the lights were out, and go to work in front of home plate. I can see Gene now, those shoulders hunched like he just wanted to get a couple of inches closer to the ground, that shirt unbuttoned to the belt, those pants rolled up to mid-calf, that laugh so deep and rich it could reach home plate from the warning track on one bounce, and that fat stogie, an inch of it going to ash in one strong pull when somebody messed with his field.