Notes

Evan Mascitti is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Managed Landscapes in the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at UMass Amherst. His work is situated in the overlap between soil science, turfgrass management, athletic-field safety, and sports-surface performance. He earned his PhD in Soil Science from Penn State in 2023, following an MS in Agronomy from Penn State and a BS in Geology from Beloit College. In this episode, Evan discusses the testing of engineered soils for baseball infields, as well as the challenges of developing soil mixtures that support safety and playability.

Links to learn more about Evan

• Evan Soil.io
• Evan on X
• Evan on LinkedIn
• Evan on GitHub

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Transcript:

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:00
Hello, everybody, and welcome to We Measure the World, a podcast produced by scientists for scientists.

EVAN MASCITTI 0:06
This particular experiment that you’re referencing, we made a suite of infield mixes using the same sand but three different clay mineralogies. And we discovered that an infield mix made with illite clay at around 60% sand would perform pretty equivalent to an infield mix made with 70% sand, but with smectite clay. So if you’re gonna rely solely on the particle size analysis, you’re missing this key variable of the clay mineralogy, you might end up with something that doesn’t suit the needs of your user.

BRAD NEWBOLD 0:45
That’s just a small taste of what we have in store for you today. We Measure the World explores interesting environmental research trends, how scientists are solving research issues, and what tools are helping them better understand measurements across the entire soil plant atmosphere continuum. Today’s guest is Evan Mascitti. Evan is an assistant professor of urban and managed landscapes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geology from Beloit College in Wisconsin and received his master’s and PhD from Penn State University, studying aspects of turfgrass and soils used in sports playing surfaces. In between stints in academia, Evan worked in the private sector in various roles from manager of field operations for the Pittsburgh Pirates to testing NFL playing surfaces as senior engineer for BioCore. His current research interests include turfgrass cultural practices, soil physical properties, clay mineralogy, and sustainable urban landscapes. And today, he’s here to talk with us about that intersection and overlap of soil science, turfgrass management, athletic field safety, and sports surface performance. So, Evan, thanks so much for being here.

EVAN MASCITTI 2:05
I’m thrilled to join. I’m always excited to talk with other folks interested in these same topics.

BRAD NEWBOLD 2:15
Awesome. We love starting out with all of our guests about getting a little bit into their background. You had said in one time that you went from a geologist to a groundskeeper and that kind of route and everywhere in between. Can you give us a little bit of background about how you got to where you’re at in the studies that you’re doing?

EVAN MASCITTI 2:42
I’ve always been fascinated by how the earth makes or supplies natural materials, and then people have figured out really interesting ways to combine them or adjust or beneficiate is the technical term, how to make things that don’t exist in nature that we can use for our own purposes. I became a geology student. I was assigned to an adviser when I went to Beloit. I was taking this first year seminar on Mars. Actually, it was an interdisciplinary class about the history and certainly the science of how Mars has been studied and looked at over time. My sort of default adviser was the head of the geology department, Karl Mendelson, and he encouraged me to take an intro geology class based on what I had articulated as my interests. And I said, Karl, you’re the geology department head. Of course, you think I should take geology. But I was immediately hooked on that. I was glad to pursue that for the four years before ultimately getting interested in turf through a summer job working at a Little League.

BRAD NEWBOLD 4:15
How have those experiences in the field and in the real world impacted the research that you’re doing now and I guess in your PhD work as well?

EVAN MASCITTI 4:30
A number of different ways. I think the most important is I stay very close to the people that are on the ground, so to speak, that are working in stadiums, dealing with challenges, working very long hours oftentimes for very little recognition, frankly. And so I kinda have my finger on the pulse of what people are experiencing. I think that that’s really important to me is to stay close to the industry and make sure that what we’re providing from the university side is both interesting and useful to those people. Many people go straight through their advanced degrees and then stay in academia, and that works for a lot of people that are ready for it. I personally, as a 22 year old kid, I don’t think I was really mature enough to kind of pursue academia. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to end up. And so working at the stadium environments in particular with people from all walks of life was really helpful for me just to grow up and kind of become well versed and more well rounded.

BRAD NEWBOLD 5:45
In those real world experiences, what did you learn there that you feel like you might not have been able to learn in the lab alone or even in academia?

EVAN MASCITTI 6:00
There’s something, especially in baseball, but even with managing turf, there’s something very primal about working with soil with your hands and feeling it with your fingers under your feet, just watching the minute nuances of how plants perform in a real environment. I think it just helps. It just provides a sort of reality check on what you’re measuring in the lab. Is this important, a, and b, does it replicate the real environment? You can learn a lot by feeling and watching, and I got really into, for a while, the history of science during the post Renaissance period into the sort of Enlightenment, and the first step of the scientific process as we now think about it is observation. It’s not equations and experiments, very brief, like just sidebar to answer. You know, the ancient Greeks, they had this idea that the highest form of knowledge could only be discerned from true thought in one’s mind, and they had a lot of good ideas, but this attitude sort of persisted for over a thousand years until we sort of started to supplant this and think that, no, actually the way to generate real knowledge is to begin from observation and things that are occurring in nature and then to sort of unveil the fundamentals of this. And so that’s something that I try to always stay grounded in is the first step of the scientific process is observation, and everything really should flow from that, so it stands on a firm basis of reality.

BRAD NEWBOLD 8:00
We can back it off to a less philosophical idea, but that’s something that I think about frequently. What you’re trying to do, what we’re trying to do here, you know, when it comes to scientific inquiry and research, yeah, it should be grounded in what we’re seeing in the real world and trying to either measure or describe or explain those phenomena.

EVAN MASCITTI 8:30
Yeah. You know, no matter how elegant or beautiful your experiment is or your theory that you’ve formed, if your idea doesn’t agree with experiments, it’s wrong. Nature is the ultimate arbiter of that.

BRAD NEWBOLD 8:55
Yeah. Again, it’s that kind of recursive, that cyclical process of being able to develop those hypotheses, test them out, come back, and seeing whether you can verify or falsify what your thoughts or hypotheses are, and then seeing how that matches the observed reality of the world around us. So enough with the philosophy of science, although that’s a lot of fun. A lot of what you have been working with centers around what are called engineered soils. That’s kind of a new phrase that I don’t think we’ve covered here on the podcast. Could you give us a little background intro into what engineered soils are and their purpose?

EVAN MASCITTI 9:48
So the word engineered really just refers to anything that’s kinda designed for a specific purpose. You guys do a variety of engineering topics here at METER Group. And, you know, soil is tremendously complex system made by nature. It’s not made by man in general. And there’s tons of variability. There’s lots of beauty in the way that the earth forms soil naturally, but oftentimes the variability in soil is not desirable for a particular situation, things like building roads and buildings, building athletic fields or golf courses. We don’t really wanna just guess and leave that up to nature, what the performance of that or the outcome of that project is. So in many cases, we will take naturally occurring soil materials, and we will do something to them, whether it’s pulverizing, blending, heating, and otherwise recombining those materials to produce something that doesn’t exist in nature. Right? And we use engineered materials all the time in our daily life from the metal alloys that are in your phone to the glass in your windshield that protects you from a piece of asphalt falling out of a truck and not smacking you in the face. So we benefit from this idea in a whole variety of ways, and soil is really the same way so that we can create something that doesn’t exist in nature.

BRAD NEWBOLD 11:35
And a lot of the work that you’ve done when it comes to engineered soils has centered around baseball fields, in the infield skin in particular. When it comes to those engineered soils, what makes that mix different than just say, grabbing the native soil or and for all of the soil scientists out there, forgive me for using the D word, but we’re gonna just talk about dirt, especially from an athlete perspective. You call it the dirt or whatever. What makes that different than when it comes to either the use or playability or other things like that? Why do we need to use the engineered soils of those infields as opposed to just maybe what’s already there?

EVAN MASCITTI 12:32
You stole my thunder with the D word joke. That’s always the first joke that I tell to academics or to other folks that are listening to a talk because, yes, absolutely, in soil science, you know, if you use that word, people look at you like you kick their dog or something. But in the baseball world, we, of course, we refer to it as dirt. There’s two elements to the question, and one is just the engineered concept in general, that the properties can be tweaked and manipulated to give the outcome that you want. So on a baseball field that is, on the infield at least, doesn’t come down to growing plants. Right? There’s no grass, no attempt to grow grass in this, unlike many other sporting surfaces. We can manipulate the mixture to get the firmness, the engineering behavior, the traction for the athletes that we need that may not exist from just the native soil in its existing state. The second element is that you need to purchase these materials and add them over time just like many other things that need to be replenished when you’re maintaining a building or a car or anything. Right? So you have to periodically replenish your infield with new material, and it’s important that that doesn’t change over time. I want the infield mix that I buy today to be the same as the infield mix I buy next year and five years from now and ten years from now. When you’re essentially mining a soil material, it’s not even necessarily always what would be considered soil by a soil scientist. Could be just substrate that hasn’t started to undergo pedogenic processes. That material has considerable amount of variability often, and so there are ways to account for this during quality control testing, and that can only be done by beneficiation procedures, I guess, so to speak.

BRAD NEWBOLD 15:05
Yeah. As you were talking, I was thinking there’s not a lot of sports out there, I guess, from an individual perspective where we play on dirt.

EVAN MASCITTI 15:18
Hopefully not.

BRAD NEWBOLD 15:22
Yeah. I know. That’s I mean, usually when we’re outdoors, we’re trying to play on nice grass or in the natural environment or other things like that. Yeah. Baseball, softball are very interesting in that way. I mean, I guess there’s the clay courts and, you know, the French Open and other places for tennis. But, yeah, aside from that, it’s kind of a unique animal and trying to manage a dirt surface, especially, yeah, a compact dirt surface that is supposed to play well and be manageable and look nice and all of the above. You know?

EVAN MASCITTI 16:10
You know, on baseball field or softball, it’s not just the infield skins. We can definitely get into the down and dirty about that. But you also have pitcher’s mound and the home plate area, which are usually different materials than the infield skin, and you also have the warning track, and then you have the turf. Right? So you have really, like, several different areas that are all being managed for different purposes. Yeah. We call it somewhat jokingly, but demeaningly the rectangle sports. Football, American football, and soccer is a little bit different than managing the skin.

BRAD NEWBOLD 17:05
Yeah. Like you mentioned, warning track, infield, batter’s box, pitcher’s mound, all those serve different purposes and have a different standard of playability. Super interesting. With each of those locations and right now, we can just talk about the infield, is that you want that infield to be, in general, nice, compact, relatively smooth, as smooth as possible. Coming from my background in baseball and especially being an infielder, I loved playing on nice fields as compared to other ones. Right? There’s that feeling you get like, I can move to this ball. It’s not gonna bounce up and pop in the face. I had experience with that. I broke my nose at 15 from a bad hop and, you know, those kinds of things. And being able to take that variability out of the equation. Right? That ball is coming to me. The grass is nicely manicured. It’s gonna hop the way it’s supposed to. There’s not gonna be any weird physics going on, and the dirt is gonna play the same way. I can just be concerned about what my body is doing and getting to the ball. And when we’re talking about that kind of playability, can you speak to a little bit about consistency being king for that kind of surface? And I guess we can talk more about that. But can you get into a little bit more detail about how you manage consistency within that playing surface?

EVAN MASCITTI 19:05
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Managing the infield in particular, it operates on a lot of different timescales. Right? So the players, they want the field to be the same every day as you alluded so that they don’t ever have to think about it. That’s not their job. That’s our job. Right? So you’re oftentimes dealing with very different weather conditions over even the course of a game, over minutes to hours. But also over the scale of months. And the players want the field to play the same, whether it’s April on a Tuesday night and it’s raining or whether it’s July 4 on a hot Sunday and it’s, you know, it’s 92 degrees. They want it to be the same, and that goes for over the course of a game too. So as a field manager, we have lots of different variables that are going on. We have wind speed. We have temperature. We have humidity. We have sunlight. Right? So all these things that govern how the water moves through the profile and out of the profile. And so the primary tool, once the field is constructed, and that’s really the engineered soils piece, is water management and grooming. And everything is geared towards smoothness, and a lot of this is done it’s really more of an art than a science. And my personal view, especially having, you know, done this for a while, that the art is never going away. This is the craft that is honed through years and years of sweat equity and experience and passed down from generation of groundskeepers, and so is the water management. We can put a little bit more of a science to that. Right? We have a lot of tools that are made here and have been developed over time. But those are the sort of things that we think about. You have all these different dials to turn as the groundskeeper, and you want those to all converge to the same place. And so that’s your job is to kind of deal with these naturally occurring variables and create the conditions over and over.

BRAD NEWBOLD 21:35
Talking about the science, let’s get into the science of the playability and the management of those surfaces. You’ve used the phrase cleat in, cleat out effect to deal with kind of describing how that surface should play. Can you put that into plain language for everybody in the audience?

EVAN MASCITTI 22:00
Definitely. Definitely. So just to be clear, I didn’t make this term up. Okay. It’s been thought about for a while. But the cleat in, cleat out concept goes back to how the player’s shoes interact with the surface, whether they’re walking, running, changing directions. Baseball players wear what we call cleated or studded shoes. Sometimes the shoes or the studs are metal. Sometimes they’re molded or plastic. This is personal preference. It’s a whole area of study of designing and testing cleats. What we’re after on the infield is the player’s cleats going into the soil, penetrating so that they can get adequate grip or traction, and then coming right out. And maybe the most tangible analogy for the listeners would be sticking a thumbtack into a corkboard, like a bulletin board to put up a piece of paper or something. When you pull that out, all you’re left with is a little hole. There’s nothing really ripped out or torn or broken. So that is what we want with the cleats. Right? So when they puncture the infield surface, they come out. All that we’re left with is a small indentation in the shape of cleat, and that’s nice because the ball won’t take any goofy bounces as the game goes on.

BRAD NEWBOLD 24:05
With that, let’s dig in a little bit more into the characteristics of the soil. We’ll talk about the soil now. Right? What are some of the primary characteristics and variables that go into making that surface really perform well when it comes to that cleat in, cleat out effect where you do just have, like you said, that puncture of the cleat, and it’s in and it’s out, and you’re moving on? Because, you know, like you mentioned and, you know, I’ve seen it where baseball players are moving all over the place. Right? They’re moving laterally forward, backwards. They’re twisting and, you know, contorting. Like, if you have a runner going from one base to the other who’s facing one way laterally and then twisting to go to the next base, those kinds of things. Can you get into the characteristics of the soil when it comes to what it’s made of, you know, its composition, as well as, and we’ll get into this a little bit more in detail, the water content of that and what we’re looking for for a really nice playable surface.

EVAN MASCITTI 25:35
So for a long time, you know, for most of the history of baseball going back to late nineteenth century, groundskeepers, they did all this by trial and error. Right? Sweat equity and just discovery observation. And they would try to mix different things together, whether it was soil that was already there, maybe straw, some kind of organic amendment to help retain water longer. Now it’s actually a well developed science that we’ll talk maybe about some of the research pushing this forward, hopefully. But usually, infield mixes are made from two components. They’re a sand of some sort, typically a wash sand to remove some of the fines, and then a finer textured soil. You know, I just lump that as clay. Right? This is sort of the colloquial term for clay, meaning a fine grained soil that has some plasticity to it. We can get into that a little. But that’s kind of the idea. So we’re not really referring to, like, particles that are only two microns as measured, you know, equivalent spherical diameter in a sedimentation cylinder or the geotechnical definition of clay. That’s more akin to what we’re talking about. It’s just called clay. Right? So we’re lumping this. Soil scientists may, again, be like a little offended by that, but for the purposes of this discussion, we mix together typically a sand and a clay in some known or specified ratio, and that can differ depending on the nature of those elements. When it comes to the playability and the cleat in, cleat out aspects, the mechanical property associated with that is called plasticity. The word plastic, when you hear this, oftentimes we might think of, you know, a Ziploc bag or plastic islands in the ocean. That word goes back to, again, actually an ancient Greek root, plastikos, which refers to clay, pottery clay, which they would use to make vessels, and that word means the capacity to be shaped and molded. And this plasticity is sort of the, it’s really the defining trait of clay in a lot of ways. You can take a ball of soil, anybody that’s worked in garden or certainly on a baseball field, you can shape and mold that clay, and that’s what allows the cleats to penetrate and exit the soil and sort of deform rather than breaking the soil in a brittle way, you know, as you might like, if you drop a coffee mug, it shatters. Right? So we wanna avoid that shattering in the soil.

BRAD NEWBOLD 29:10
So we got clays. We got sands. Let’s talk about the water side of things. How important is water content within the soil there, the subsurface, in allowing for that cleat in, cleat out effect and the nice playability of the surface?

EVAN MASCITTI 29:35
Yeah. Water, it’s everything. So this is the chief lever that you pull on game day up and down to manipulate the mechanical properties of the soil. Water is a very unique substance. It has bulk properties that allow it to remain as a liquid at a very wide variety of temperatures, and it literally is the glue that holds the soil particles together. Clay in particular has a very high affinity for water. The surfaces that are charged, you know, based on the mineralogy that I mean, literally, atomic structure of the crystalline lattice governs the way that you will experience soil water interactions at the macroscopic level. So water is the glue. We sometimes describe this as like a lubricant that allows the particles to slide past one another. That’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s pretty close, right? So the water acts as sort of the medium that links the particles together, allows them to slide past one another. Right? They’re very, very small. Clay particles are too small to see even with the best light microscope. They can slide past one another in their platey configuration. They can take up this new configuration, and they can deform a little bit and take up the new positions without actually breaking.

BRAD NEWBOLD 31:35
Yeah. So how then does water content, I guess, change in an infield from something that’s nice and safe and playable to something that, again, is unstable or I’ve played in really wet surfaces with that clay, and that clay is gonna stick to your cleats, and you’re gonna have big heavy boots, and that’s definitely not something easy to play with.

EVAN MASCITTI 32:05
Yeah. Going back to the properties of water, those particles have this affinity for water. The particles are pulling very strongly on the water. And if you think back to, you know, Newton’s third law, for every force, there’s an equal and opposite force, and so if the particles are pulling on the water, the water is also pulling on the particles, and that’s what allows them to provide this stiffness or mechanical resistance. Now, as the soil dries down, the water content’s reduced, higher tension, negative pressure. That’s the mechanism that’s holding the particles together that allows it to be firmer and stiffer. Now on the other end, you’re talking about losing the stability, losing the mechanical resistance that you are gonna start making footprints, or even getting bogged in the soil. As we add more water, the particles are they’re separated. They’re further and further away from one another, and that suction, the negative pressure, is reduced. And so we get to the point where there can actually be positive pore water pressure, and when you apply a load to that, water doesn’t have any bearing capacity itself, and so your foot will shear away.

BRAD NEWBOLD 33:38
Right. Right. Every good groundskeeper knows their field or fields, you know, like their children. Right? And they know the characteristics. They know where these are dry spots. These are wet spots. This kind of behaves or performs this way or that way or whatever. How are grounds crews, groundskeepers, the field managers, how are they measuring that water content or potentially, you know, suction or other things like that? Is it nowadays? Is it mainly just kinda like look and feel or other things? Or are they using specific sensors to be able to gauge the water content of their fields?

EVAN MASCITTI 34:30
There’s a couple ways. Some high-tech, some not as high-tech. The kind of traditional test that most people are taught is called the key test. So in the morning, you can walk out to your infield as you’re getting ready to plan the day’s activities. You have a, you know, industrial big brass key. You can jam this in the soil, and you can just feel the amount of resistance. So it’s kind of like a pseudo penetrometer test. Right. And ideally, like the cleat in, cleat out effect, you can stick that key in. It can come out nice and clean with no material stuck to it. So that gives you two elements or two pieces of information, the resistance and also the stickiness. As far as more quantitative measures, the main tool that people use is volumetric water content probe. So that could be either something that’s portable, handheld, you can go around to multiple different spots and measure the water content at a particular depth, right, depends on the depth of the probes that you’re using. For baseball, typically the top inch is really where we’re concerned for the cleat in, cleat out effect. You might check further below to see how the water might move over the course of time up or down. Some field managers have them actually buried in the infield skin also.

BRAD NEWBOLD 36:15
Okay. What do they do then with that information, whether it’s throughout the course of a season or from season to season, or even what granularity or time scale are they looking at that and using that information?

EVAN MASCITTI 36:35
So water content changes, you know, on an hourly basis oftentimes, and so certainly looking at spatially how the infield might change from place to place, maybe it’s a low spot where you haven’t had a chance to add more material, maybe the shortstop, you know, bowls part of the infield out over time, often you’ll find that water will not only run there during a rain event or during hand watering, but also over time overnight. We would oftentimes put a little bit of extra water up on the top, so to speak, of the infield skin closer to the grass where it’s higher because you know you have to account for some lateral flow over time. So as far as, like, the granularity goes, again, you could take a lot of different measurements in certain areas and over time, and it does change quite a bit.

BRAD NEWBOLD 37:35
Along with that, you’ve done a lot of lab work and testing of this cleat in, cleat out effect and different soil types, their characteristics, and composition, and water contents. Can you briefly give us a background into what you’ve been doing, what you’ve been developing in those lab tests?

EVAN MASCITTI 38:00
When you go to test different soils, this is what, of course, we’re most interested in is the mix design. When I first sort of approached this topic as a researcher, there’s no there were no methods to do this. Right? So, you know, in a perfect world, you could test this using real athletes under real outside conditions. For a research experiment, this isn’t that practical because human subjects are, a, there’s lots of safety clearances you have to get. You can’t put people at risk. There’s just tons of variability across athletes, and if we’re interested in the surface, we need to pull that variability out of the experiment. So we decided that using a lab test would be much more repeatable. You could do it over time. You could control some of the input forces, etcetera. So this is the first challenge, and this is pretty typical in a lot of PhD projects, is we wanna measure X, but first we have to create a method to measure X. So we built this device with the help of an engineering services shop that could apply relevant forces using cleats that we took off of a real shoe, and then we would actually create these cleat indentations at a variety of different water contents on our experimental soil mixtures, and then we use a 3D scanning technique to quantify how much the soil was disturbed. And from that, we can kind of glean some idea of how this particular soil will behave across water content.

BRAD NEWBOLD 40:10
Right. What METER instrumentation are you working with right now?

EVAN MASCITTI 40:22
Oh, yeah. So I recently acquired the three step flagship LABROS system. Okay. Yeah. So that includes the KSAT for measuring hydraulic conductivity. Then you take that sample, you put it onto the HYPROP so we can get the moisture retention curve, unsaturated hydraulic conductivity. And finally, that WP4C to get the full moisture retention curve to understand as this going back to the infield thing, as the soil suction increases as the material dries down, how much of that water is available to the plant? What are the mechanical forces anchoring the soil together, both from an infield standpoint, but even on a turf surface that will impact firmness. And so that’s kind of where we are so far. We’ve talked about a little more environmental monitoring technology. But, yeah, excited to continue the relationship.

BRAD NEWBOLD 41:35
Yeah. And with that, I guess, spoiler alert, you found some really interesting cool stuff about the characteristics. Would you consider it an optimal playing surface when it comes to the clay versus sand versus water proportion? Do you feel like you found an optimal, or is it just for the experiments that you were running that you felt like you kind of found a good balance of those three?

EVAN MASCITTI 42:10
There’s multiple ways to get to the same end, and this really mirrors turf management as a whole. You talk to 20 different groundskeepers or greenkeepers on the golf course side. You’ll probably find 20 different ways to do task X. It’s rather analogous to the infield mix design because you can make high quality materials from a lot of different raw sources. It may be a function of mixing them in different ratios, understanding how that ratio will govern the properties. So in this particular experiment that you’re referencing, we made a suite of infield mixes using the same sand, but three different clay mineralogies. And we discovered that an infield mix made with illite clay at around 60% sand would perform pretty equivalent to an infield mix made with 70% sand but with smectite clay. So if you’re gonna rely solely on the particle size analysis, you’re missing this key variable of the clay mineralogy, and you might end up with something that doesn’t suit the needs of your user. I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily one optimal or best recipe, just like my fiancé makes really good blueberry muffins. Right? So she’s got a recipe, but somebody else might have a different recipe. They might put in different amounts of flour. They might use more blueberries, but they might come out pretty similar in the end.

BRAD NEWBOLD 44:10
Along with that, for there not being an optimal, are there similarities in what the surface is or at least the soils that go into the surface is? From your experience and what you’ve seen, there’s different play. We’ve got different stadiums, speaking particularly of Major League Baseball. So you’ve got places, for instance, close to here, Seattle. Different climate, different potentially needs than, say, San Diego or even like Boston or other things like that. Is it more similar across the league when it comes to those playing surfaces, or do you see these kind of regional or local characteristics that are specific to those locations?

EVAN MASCITTI 45:02
So I think this has shifted. At one point, it was absolutely it was local materials being used all the time. Currently, I think groundskeepers are comfortable with materials they’ve used in the past, whether it’s at a different facility or where they’re working now. And oftentimes, they’re imported from quite far away because they have very predictable properties, and there’s only a handful of suppliers that are really capable of making this kind of material that understand the rigorous quality control that’s necessary and some specialized equipment. And so I think there is opportunity for potentially tailoring mixtures to the geography, but I would say that we’re not, it’s not where we are now.

BRAD NEWBOLD 46:10
Alright. Major League Baseball is very particular in a lot of different ways. There’s a lot of fun traditions, but especially when it comes to the soil or dirt, you know, the special mud that they rub on the balls from a very specific place and only certain people do that and it’s been done that way for, you know, for a century or whatever and it’s kind of a closely held secret, you know, those kinds of fun things. So, yeah, I was wondering if there’s anything in particular going on with the different soils or amendments or other characteristics for each of the stadiums there.

EVAN MASCITTI 47:00
There’s a cool paper that came out maybe three years ago. There’s some soil scientists bought some of that mud, or somehow obtained it, that they, for the listeners that aren’t familiar, every baseball that goes into a Major League game is rubbed with this very particular mud, and this is kind of an art. They rub up, I think it’s seven or eight dozen balls a game. Yeah. So it has this very specific feel to it, you know, friction that the oils in your fingers interact with, and it has a certain feel. And this has been purchased from the same place for, I don’t know, decades. So somebody got ahold of some of this and ran some laser scattering particle size analysis and even some X-ray diffraction on it to see, like, could we make an engineered material that would replicate this? I don’t know where that has gone, but you gotta think there’s an eventual way.

BRAD NEWBOLD 48:20
One of my other questions following up on that with engineering materials, going back to kind of these engineered soils, is kind of an industry is out there for engineered infield playing for, you know, the dirt or the soils that go into that?

EVAN MASCITTI 48:50
It’s big, to use a bad soil pun. The market at the higher levels is pretty saturated. I think most of these stadium facilities now have something like this. There’s probably a handful that are out there that don’t. Personally, if I were ever going back to groundskeeping, you know, if I were gonna take over a new facility, this would be something I would require that I have to have this as a tool. Right? So it puts you at an advantage. I would say the biggest opportunity is for lower budget facilities, and it can be a really good investment. Oftentimes, there’s sticker shock associated with installing this kind of material. There is a lot of handling and processing and oftentimes trucking, which is certainly expensive, you know, with the fuel prices being what they are. But as a facility that doesn’t have a huge budget, they really ought to look at this as an investment in playing more games. Okay? So at Major Leagues, the revenue is generated from, certainly from TV rights, but also ticket sales and food. And so losing a gate, they call this to be the industry term, losing a game because of the weather conditions, that’s very damaging. And it’s not that different at the lower levels. Tournament facility might be generating a majority of their revenue on one weekend. They’re bringing in revenue from registration fees, but also from selling hot dogs and T shirts. And so preserving that event could be really a huge element of that facility maintaining its financial viability. The other thing is if you have multiple fields, you don’t have to do them all at once. Right? The excess could be tens of thousands of dollars to renovate a four or eight or 16 complex field, or in a lot of cases, you know, maybe a parks department or a school district has 30 fields they have. There’s no way they’re gonna do all that in one lump sum, and you’re not gonna convince the financial backers to do this either. So we like to advocate, just do one. One of my mentors, Paul Zwaska, taught me this, that if people can see this with their own eyes, they can see, look, we can get out of this field sooner after a rain event. Yeah. Or even down the street, our rival high school has this material. Why can we play on their field when we can’t play on ours? Just do one, and you’ll let people see the benefit of this, and oftentimes, it’s gonna more than pay for itself.

BRAD NEWBOLD 52:35
Let’s transition a little bit. We still wanna talk about playable surfaces. You’ve had some history and some experience in testing turf surfaces, natural turf for the National Football League through previous work as a research engineer. Can you tell us a little bit about what that experience was and what you were specifically looking at when it came to playability, player safety and performance of the surface?

EVAN MASCITTI 53:10
Yeah. We could do a whole podcast or maybe a podcast season just on this natural synthetic topic, and there’s lots of arguments for both, and I’m not a proponent for banning artificial turf or having all natural or all synthetic. There’s lots of different complexities that go into this. But from an athlete safety perspective, you know, as a field manager, our goal is to create a playable surface that is uniform, that’s fair, really the same for both teams. There’s elements of home field advantage that people like to ask for and that we try to accommodate sometimes as groundskeepers. But our goal is always to have the athletes safe. That’s the number one priority. And that doesn’t change whether it’s natural or synthetic. One of the trends, and this is a slow trend. Right? Change takes a long time. People have been working on this safety piece for thirty plus years. My major professor, Andy McNitt, was doing this stuff back in 1990, and his predecessor, Don Waddington, had this vision of someday we will have to test sports fields, and we’ll have to verify that they’re safe. Just like we verify all sorts of other products. You know, you wouldn’t put your child in a car seat that hadn’t been tested by, you know, the relevant governing certification body. So we’re in this process of developing new test tools that can be portable, can be taken out onto an actual field, and measure these things. Right? And so like most things, athlete engagement with the surface has sort of an optimal level. So think about traction, for example. So traction is needed so the players can run around. They can make their maneuvers safely and in a fair way. They can propel. They can change directions. So that traction, we need some, but we don’t need too much. Right? So there’s this like an envelope, so to speak. If you have not enough traction, the players can slip. This could be a performance detriment if they’re sliding all over. On the other hand, if we have too much traction, the cleat surface interaction is too aggressive would be the term that’s often used with the test devices. This can be a potential safety hazard too because we call this foot fixation or entrapment, where the cleats get so stuck that as you try to make a maneuver, instead of the cleats giving away or the surface giving away that interaction, your ACL might give away. Right? So we’re after this kinda optimal traction envelope, and there’s a lot of new exciting test devices to help facilitate putting a number to this so that we can actually predict or verify the surface is safe.

BRAD NEWBOLD 56:45
Right. Right. What is that trade off? I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t a trade off between, like you said, the traction and firmness and consistency and those kinds of things. If we’re talking about, you know, football fields, like, they can get torn up during a game and after each game, you’re having to, you know, kind of fix those and make sure that they are looking good and that playability is consistent from game to game, from spot to spot. Are there any trade offs that are usually made or need to be made between traction, consistency, playability, safety, those kinds of things?

EVAN MASCITTI 57:40
One of the trade offs I would say, going back to the traction piece, is this trade off between safety and performance, at least on that high end of that traction envelope. Most athletes, believe it or not, don’t think that much about their safety, especially at the higher echelons. They’re really concerned with how can I get faster? How can I get bigger? How can I get stronger? And in some cases, I think the athletes are coming up sort of on the limits of human biology. The players are so big and so strong and so muscular. The loads that they’re imposing on their joints are really just not sustainable, and you’re seeing this in baseball. Right? Sometimes relief pitchers are, teams go through them like Kleenex. You make it up to the Major Leagues. You pitch for X number of years, and you blow your elbow up. Right? So this is disheartening. But there is this trade off where players often prefer a more aggressive cleat just based on the way it feels underfoot. They also choose their cleats based on lots of other variables, whether it’s the look, their shoe deal that they have with Nike or Adidas or whoever it is, and also just what their buddies are wearing. Right? So there’s lots of other considerations that are often made besides what we as the sports science or groundskeepers or even the athletic training staff, like what we might recommend. So that’s kind of an ongoing battle sometimes.

BRAD NEWBOLD 59:55
You have any insight into what the turf growers or the researchers are looking into when it comes to how to grow turf and a substrate that will perform well? Again, coming back to water content that doesn’t pond, you know, that water moves through that substrate. The turf looks nice. You know, it’s nice and green. It plays well, and it’s safe. Right? And it’s safe for those players. What kind of research is going on? I know it’s kind of a broad question, but what kind of research is going on to allow so we don’t have to make those trade offs so it can be consistent, there can be traction, it can be, you know, safe and playable.

EVAN MASCITTI 1:01:00
Yeah. This is apropos of my trip actually to Eastern Washington. We’re presenting some work done with the NFL while I was at my former employer on producing sod for this particular application. To back up for a quick second to the high level for listeners that aren’t familiar, sod is basically a layer of turfgrass and the adhering soil that’s rolled up, harvested for transport, severed from the underlying soil, or in certain cases, grown with plastic underneath. And this is done all the time in higher end facilities. In the NFL, it could be done three or four times a year during the season. You know, people are sort of unaware of this. The players, I think, are unaware sometimes that this transition has even taken place. So the sod technology and the skill of sod growers has grown tremendously in the last couple decades. This used to be unthinkable that you could re-sod your field in the middle of season and go out and play on it. You could sod on Thursday and play on Sunday. That’s crazy. Right? This sod is very thick, so it’s cut with very substantial root system still intact, and that’s why you can lay them and play on it so quickly, especially when they use these very large strips, could be four feet long or four feet wide by maybe 30 or even longer. So, I’ve worked with a number of sod growers, and I love working with sod growers, and I find that almost every conversation I have with a sod grower, I learn something. They think really differently compared to the sort of standard steady state turf manager that’s keeping their grass year after year after year. They have a different mindset. And there’s a tremendous amount of thought that goes into producing these sod. You know, it is a product. Right? It’s truly a crop. It’s one of really the only elements of turfgrass management that is truly, you know, agricultural production. And so these are engineered, not just the soil, but you have this extra layer now of plant material. So it’s a carefully chosen turfgrass variety or cultivar that’s introduced in a specific way. It’s managed with a known production interval oftentimes. So you might have to plan months or even a year or upwards of a year in advance to know, okay. We have this concert. We have, you know, right now, the FIFA World Cup’s going on. There’s been a tremendous amount of planning that’s gone into that and making sure there’s adequate sod supply to be installed on a very tight timeframe oftentimes. So the sod growers are using sometimes specific sand gradations, and they’re on a very specific regimen of plant growth regulators, fertilizers, all to engineer this sod so that when it’s harvested, it has specific mechanical properties.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:05:10
Yeah. You’ve been continuing to research turfgrass and soils and other things in your current position at UMass Amherst. Can you tell us a little bit about the continued research that you’re doing into these areas and what things are looking like going forward?

EVAN MASCITTI 1:05:40
Yeah. Totally. My sort of area is certainly geared towards soils, soil physical properties. So I think we have lots of different ways to build sports fields and golf course root zones, and, you know, to some degree, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel because this works pretty well. I do think there’s a lot of opportunity for novel construction profiles and methods at this sort of middle ground between this stadium facility where I would say money is no object, but there’s enough budget to get what needs done, you know, done, down to the municipal fields that don’t have $50 to buy grass seed and fertilizer. Right? Most of those facilities, I think, are underserved by us as academics in general. And so finding ways to do more with less that’s more sustainable and more economically realistic for those kind of facilities, that’s an area that I’m really interested in. The other thing, going back to the natural and synthetic topic, we have this need for safe, playable athletic fields in all weather conditions, but we don’t have a ton of money to devote to management. People don’t realize that the only choices are not playing on bare dirt, bare soil. It’s hard and compacted and full of knotweed and no grass on it, or tearing this out and putting in a $2,000,000 synthetic field. There’s tons of intermediate ways to do this using potentially more affordable materials. We can do sand capping. We can do slit drainage. We can do all sorts of other intermediate ways to build these fields that aren’t gonna necessarily provide the performance or the durability of a stadium facility that can be replaced all the time, but maybe something in the middle. The other thing that these facilities need to consider, in my opinion, more is just frequent resurfacing using sod. I think a lot of times these places don’t think they could ever afford this. They look at an NFL field that gets sodded four times a year, and they say, we could never, we can’t do that. And, of course, they can’t afford to do this with thick cut sod four times a year. But over the lifespan, the life cycle of a ten year or a twenty year replacement, you know, right, when you put a synthetic field in, eventually the carpet does have to be replaced. You can re-sod your field with natural grass or even a portion of the field, the goalmouths, the middle of the gut, we call it, right, on an American football field. You can re-sod this pretty often, maybe every two years. This will still cost you less than a synthetic field over the lifespan. Right? So these sorts of comparisons, understanding the best ways to help that type of facility create a high quality playing surface because everybody deserves to play on something that’s safe.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:09:55
Yeah. As you’re looking forward here in the future, what are you hoping to be able to dig into? And then also from the technology side of things when it comes to either like we talked about at the beginning, whether it’s measuring, describing, explaining what’s going on. Is there anything on the technology side of things that you’re really interested in or that you wish were available?

EVAN MASCITTI 1:10:35
I think the technology is growing and exploding faster than we know what to do with it as turf managers, and that’s even irrespective of kind of the AI boom. But I think the tools allow us to manage things at a greater scale than maybe we could before using some of the remote sensing, tracking things in real time instead of having to go out and take measurements visually or manually. It’s not scalable at a complex that has dozens or even hundreds of fields over the course of a whole district. So I think the scale is one element. I think also tracking, you know, how your inputs are actually affecting the performance. It’s hard to remember what you’ve done, even if you keep really good records. So this allows a little bit of feedback about what you’re doing and how that’s impacting quality of what you’re attempting to produce. One thing that I think would be cool to measure that I’m working on a little bit is the planarity of playing surfaces. If you walk out on a sports field, sometimes from far away, it looks fine. There’s a saying, good from far, but far from good. Right? So it looks okay. When you walk on it, it’s not that uniform, and this can impact certainly ball response. You have a baseball hit, little clump of ryegrass can take a goofy bounce just like it would on the skin. But also this is a potential safety hazard for an ankle. And so even if on average, macroscopically, the traction of the impact properties are fine, there’s always this microtopography in smaller regions where the field’s not uniform. And so finding ways to quantify and then produce an intervention that can alter that property, I think that’s something that’s just one example.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:13:35
Yeah. As we close here, any other final comments, any other thoughts that you’d like to leave with our audience about things that you’re doing, things they wish they knew about your research?

EVAN MASCITTI 1:13:55
I’ll just put a plug for the UMass turf program. I was thrilled to join almost a year ago it’s been now, and we have currently about 40 students enrolled. Most are have aspirations to work in the golf course world, which is awesome. I think there’s a huge opportunity to grow the sports turf element of what we’re doing. There’s lots of students that we, I think, are missing in urban areas. I grew up in the city. I didn’t grow up on a farm. I didn’t play golf that much. And I never was aware of this as a career until my mentor who I mentioned earlier, Paul Zwaska, sort of took me under his wing and pointed out to me that, yeah, turf management is a career, and it’s a professional career. Right? So it provides lots of interesting applications of STEM. Right? So it’s very interdisciplinary. You have lots of different scientific fields, biology, chemistry, physics, entomology, that all go into our job. The grass is just one element of it. Right? There’s also managing people, but it combines a lot of things that people are looking for. And I think compared to some of the fear of technology maybe taking people’s jobs, I think this can only help us in turf. So for younger people that are interested in, know, something that is kinda techy but also has some more, like, fundamental elements of working outside, it’s just an awesome career, and I think I’m looking forward to engaging with more high schools and those sort of places that just aren’t aware of what we have to offer. So that’s kind of my plug for the program itself. I’m excited about the research, excited to work with METER Group moving forward. We didn’t talk too much about the moisture technology, but a lot of that can be incorporated into the engineering mindset, right, designing and then building and then maintaining a sports surface to produce what you need for a given sport because it’s different. Right? Soccer field, American football field, and a baseball field, field hockey field, they’re all different, And they require our engineering input, and I think the future is bright for sports turf.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:17:10
Awesome. Well, Evan, thanks for stopping by. We appreciate the discussion. I really tried hard to not dominate in discussing and talking about baseball, which is one of my favorite things. Discussion has been amazing and a lot of fun. So thanks.

EVAN MASCITTI 1:17:32
Much appreciated. It was great, and I look forward to keeping up.

BRAD NEWBOLD 1:17:45
Alright. And if you in the audience have any questions about this topic or want to hear more, feel free to contact us at METER Group dot com or reach out to us on X at meter_env. And you can also view the full transcript from today in the podcast description. That’s all for now, and we’ll catch you next time on We Measure the World.