Groundskeeper

Maryland Baseball Limited Partnership is branching out into stadium management and maintenance.The owners of the Bowie Baysox, Frederick Keys and Delmarva Shorebirds have hired Murray Cook, former major-league groundskeeper and recently manager of the Disney Sports Complex in Florida, to oversee their Ballpark Services division, which will be available to service facilities throughout the country.Chief executive officer Peter Kirk said Cook will concentrate first on "running our facilities, but he has also been contacted by St. Louis and Montreal to run their new [spring training]

When Paul Zwaska moved into his new Timonium home four years ago, the first thing the head Orioles groundskeeper did was kill his lawn -- on purpose.The patchy "developer's" grass was driving him crazy, he says. After all, this is a man who cultivates the emerald-green, picture-perfect ball field at Oriole Park at Camden Yards for a living."When the grass is kept right it looks beautiful," said Zwaska, explaining his love of turf. "I just like to look at a well-manicured lawn."But these days, Zwaska, who works about 100 hours a week when the Birds are in town, is resigned to cutting his own yard on the fly."

The blisteringly hot, sticky weather is an answer to Vince Patterozzi's prayers.The chief groundskeeper for the Ravens had been hoping for a hot spell to perk up the new field, which, until recent days, was pocked with brown spots and thin patches -- leading some to wonder if it would be ready by the first preseason game, against the Chicago Bears on Aug. 8."I was hoping for this about two weeks ago," Patterozzi said.He's been watering the field heavily and, a few weeks ago, did some light reseeding, hoping to revive the grass from its winter nap. The half-natural, half-artificial field was brought over from Memorial Stadium in strips and augmented with some fresh growth trucked in from Florida.

Three hours before game time, Paul Zwaska, the Orioles' groundskeeper, inspects the field to make sure he has covered all his bases.The field has been seeded and sodded, rolled and raked, watered and whipped into shape. It has been aerated, edged, fertilized, limed, sprayed for weeds and mowed five times over, in that nifty checkerboard pattern. The turf even had its temperature taken.Zwaska nods, satisfied there is nothing left to do to the diamond -- except play on it."The trick to Opening Day is getting all the work done before the press gets in the way," said Zwaska, braced for the pre-game hoopla that would trample the field.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- ''I have finished another year,'' said God, as reported in a published interview with Thomas Hardy, ''In grey, green, white, and brown . . .''Well, He has almost finished it, anyway. The end's in sight. When the sun goes down this evening, it will have slipped southward on the western horizon almost to Bel Air. That's where it bottoms out, at least from this perspective. Then, in a few more days, it'll begin scrabbling its arc northward again until, six months later, it'll be setting in the direction of Pylesville.

Let's not think about it.Let's not think about Mike Mussina pitching on three days' rest.Let's not think about Randy Johnson meeting the law of averages.Let's not think about the Orioles becoming the first team in major-league history to lose a best-of-five series by dropping the final three games at home.It's not going to happen, is it?It had better not, or the warehouse will be condemned.Owner Peter Angelos will fire you-know-who.And an entire city will suffer a news breakdown.Really, there's no reason to panic.

Between 1986 and 1995, a cemetery in Laurel secretly buried two bodies in a single plot "on multiple occasions," a former groundskeeper at the cemetery alleges in a $7 million lawsuit.The lawsuit, filed in Prince George's County Circuit Court, claims that the groundskeeper, Francis E. Della of Fairfax, Va., was wrongfully fired in August after he told supervisors at Maryland National Memorial Park he would not perform any more double burials.The suit is the first time that Della, who started working at the cemetery in February 1986, has made his charges public.

TV anchor does a little field workIt's about time Harry Smith put in an honest day's work.The co-anchor of "CBS This Morning," who may be leaving the show soon, spent yesterday helping tend the grounds at Oriole Park at Camden Yards for one of his "Hey Harry, Do My Job" segments.Mr. Smith, whose previous jobs-for-a-day have included minister, dairy farmerand blue-crab fisherman, started his workday at 8: 30 a.m. as a part of groundskeeper Paul Zwaska's crew. His duties included mowing the grass, chalking the field and raking the dirt to remove rocks.

Prosecutors in Prince George's County are investigating whether a Laurel cemetery removed bodies, caskets and burial vaults from some graves and reburied them in unmarked areas of the property.The investigation stems from allegations made by a former cemetery groundskeeper, Frank Della of Fairfax, Va., after he was fired in August from Maryland National Memorial Park in Laurel.According to documents provided to investigators, interviews with former employees and a source in the criminal justice system familiar with the probe, Mr. Della told the state's attorney's office that between February 1986 and July 1990, there were as many as a dozen such reburials at the cemetery.

The last thing Till Strudwick, a Loyola College groundskeeper, expected yesterday was to hear himself hailed as a campus hero, the embodiment of the standards Loyola strives to teach.But Saturday, on a campus street, Mr. Strudwick found an envelope holding $2,200 in cash. Stunned to be holding that much money, and worried about the person who lost it, Mr. Strudwick gave the cash to security, who returned it to a freshman.His good deed did not go unnoticed. Yesterday, when college employees gathered for the annual start-of-the-school-year program, Loyola's president, the Rev. Joseph A. Sellinger, S. J., led the applause for an overwhelmed Mr. Strudwick.

Thomas cannot read or write. He lives with his mother in a two-story house in Hamilton, purchased with rolled change and savings from working as a groundskeeper at the Johns Hopkins University. He has longed to escape Baltimore and buy a ranch house in the country with a fenced yard and a room large enough for a pool table. Now, Thomas, 43, knows he'll never get that - because two people he trusted stole his entire life savings. Two weeks ago, Joseph L. Moody, a groundskeeper who worked with Thomas for a decade, and Moody's girlfriend Janet Gilmore pleaded guilty to stealing more than $150,000 from Thomas.

While the Orioles produced some of the best teams in baseball over three decades, beginning in the 1960s, they went unchallenged when it came to their garden. The tomato plants that grew at old Memorial Stadium, and the competitions between head groundskeeper Pat Santarone and manager Earl Weaver that sprouted along with them, are almost as legendary as any championships that were won. Santarone died unexpectedly Tuesday at his home in Hamilton, Mont. He was 79. "Pat and I were very close.

It's too early for former Orioles groundskeeper Pasquale "Pat" Santarone to put in his tomato plants. After leaving Baltimore and his old turf at Memorial Stadium in 1991, he has been living in the Rockies in Hamilton, Mont. - elevation, 4,000 feet. The grass in his valley is now green, but a storm this week deposited fresh snow on the Sapphire Range a mile from his home. He lives there with his English-born wife, Pam, whom he married after his wife, Delores, died in a 1998 automobile accident.

Nicole Sherry would rather you forget her name. You see, if Sherry and her team are doing their jobs, no one should notice. The vibrant green outfield grass, the riot of spring color in the flowerpots, the crisp stripes of white from home plate to foul poles should all appear as if by magic. "We're behind the scenes, and that's how I'd like to keep it," the Orioles' new head groundskeeper says. Easier said than done this week. As only the second woman in the major leagues to be a head groundskeeper, Sherry has been grooming her public relations image almost as much as the turf.

A Baltimore County school system groundskeeper is recovering from injuries suffered Tuesday when a plastic bottle filled with a liquid exploded after he picked it up while mowing grass at Middle River Middle School, police said. Keith Duckworth, 41, was cutting grass at the school when he saw the bottle, police said. He put it in a trash bucket on the mower, The bottle exploded, causing minor injuries to his face and neck.

Dave Nehila, head groundskeeper for Orioles Park at Camden Yards, manages a full-time grounds crew of six people and a game-time tarp crew of 15. The grounds crew is responsible for the maintenance of the 2 1/2 acres of grass and dirt at the baseball field. Some of the crew's efforts last longer than others. Crew members regularly repair the batter's box and pitcher's mound. But this is the first piece of work to be undone as hitters and pitchers dig in for better footing during a game.

Joseph Earl Somers, a retired Memorial Stadium groundskeeper and softball umpire whose license tag read THE UMP, died of heart disease Monday at St. Agnes HealthCare. The Violetville resident was 77. Born in Baltimore and raised on North Payson Street, he attended city public schools until the fourth grade and picked up the rest of his education on his own. As a young man, he played baseball and boxed. He served in the Army from 1946 to 1947 and fought in a lightweight class while stationed in Alaska.

Joe N. McKella, a retired groundskeeper and World War II veteran, died of heart failure Friday at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Baltimore. The longtime city resident was 84. Mr. McKella was born in Quitman, Ga., and raised in Miami. During World War II, he served with an Army infantry unit in Europe. He moved to Baltimore in 1945 and went to work as a miller at the William G. Scarlett Seed Co. near Little Italy. After the company closed in the mid-1980s, he took a job as a groundskeeper at the Carriage Hill Village apartments in Randallstown.

TED WILLIAMS once suggested that hitting a baseball was the hardest thing to do in sports. But hitting a baseball isn't as hard as ignoring idiots in the stands who are calling you names while you try to do your job. That is tough. Players don't get to practice it, as they do other aspects of their craft. Managers and coaches can't teach the fundamentals, imparting tips culled from years of experience. The players are out there on their own and under orders not to succumb to the anger that might swell inside them.

Raymond "Stack of Dollars" Clay Sr., a former Baltimore & Ohio Railroad supervisor and University of Maryland groundskeeper, died of prostate cancer April 22 at Howard County General Hospital. The Laurel resident was 92. Mr. Clay was born and raised in Wilson, N.C., and came to Baltimore in the early 1930s when he went to work for the B&O on a track gang. He was later promoted to supervisor. From 1956 until retiring in 1976, Mr. Clay was a groundskeeper and supervisor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where one of his responsibilities was Cole Field House.