A visitor to Segra Stadium in downtown Fayetteville will note a lot of things. The seats, for example, or the big yellow poles down each baseline.
Everything inside the walls — the infield, the outfield, the warning track around the field — it’s all the domain of Alpha Jones, the director of field operations for the Fayetteville Woodpeckers. Impressed? You should be, and players, coaches, and officials across minor league baseball were as well. Alpha was honored in November 2023 as the Carolina League and Single-A Groundskeeper of the Year.
For context, Segra Stadium is one of 12 ballparks across the Carolina League (which also has teams in Zebulon, Kannapolis, and Kinston), and there are 30 in all of the Single-A league.
“When I first heard about it, I couldn’t believe it,” Alpha says. “It’s something I knew about and wanted to achieve, but I was not thinking ‘23 was my year. I’m very much a person that we come in every day and we try to be successful every day, but we don’t really think of being successful for the whole year to win the award.”
But what is a story about a baseball field doing in the “Home & Garden” issue? In short, it’s the home of the Woodpeckers, and it’s landscaping on a high level, led by an award-winning, veteran, dedicated groundskeeper named Alpha.
All about Alpha
Originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Alpha grew up in a family that gardened. His grandfather grew veggies and other food in the yard for both his family and others in their area, and his dad had a small garden for fresh vegetables. But Alpha didn’t really have a green thumb.
He did like sports. Unsurprisingly, he grew up a fan of the Steelers and the Pirates — football was his favorite sport to watch, and baseball was his favorite to play. After getting a degree in political science from the University of Pittsburgh, he moved to North Carolina with his wife and worked for an insurance company. A coworker asked him if he’d be interested in mowing the grass at their church.
“After talking with her for a few minutes, I said, ‘I’ll go take a look at it,’” he says. “I looked at it and it took 30 minutes. By the end of that summer, I had six customers.”
That church lawn turned into a landscaping business — “We were kind of the kings of the fast food chains in the Raleigh/Durham area,” Alpha says — and his time in the grass and dirt grew from there. Stints at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary and a private school followed, during which he started working part-time in groundskeeping at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, home of the Triple-A Durham Bulls.
“I grew up wanting to play pro ball, had a couple tryouts that went nowhere,” he said. “It really dawned on me one day that this was a way to stay around baseball.”
In 2019, after working for the Bulls and then at Longwood University in Virginia as the assistant athletic director for athletic facilities, Alpha joined the Woodpeckers when Segra Stadium opened.
Safe, playable, pleasing
Taking care of a baseball field is a team job, as Alpha will be the first to tell you. And it’s quite a job. Explaining the whole process would take more words than there is room for in this space.
Alpha says there are three keys to all sports field managers, whether working with a baseball field, soccer field, or any field that hosts athletics. It needs to be safe for players, it needs to be predictable and reliable as a playing surface, and it needs to look good.
“If you really are doing those three things, before the game starts, everybody notices how beautiful the field is,” he says. “When the game starts, nobody is thinking about the field because the players are able to do what they have to do in order to play the game the right way. The field’s not interfering.”
Most baseball fields are built with three pieces, more or less: the infield, the outfield, and the warning track. The infield is part grass, part dirt (Alpha says they call it the “skin”). 90% of a baseball game is played on the infield, Alpha says, so it’s an important part to keep in good condition. The outfield is all grass, the warning track is a mixture of harder substances like dirt and sand.
The infield “skin,” Alpha says, is made of 60%-80% clay, with the rest a mixture of silt and sand. Alpha and the rest of the field operations staff work throughout game week to keep the “skin” not too firm but not too wet. That includes repairing holes and patches made by players standing and running through the infield dirt and raking it with the goal of a consistently smooth surface.
A key piece is watering the dirt, but not too much. They don’t want a puddle, but they don’t want brick.
“If it’s too wet, then of course it gets too soft,” Alpha says. “If it’s too dry, it’s as hard as a rock. So we actually manipulate how much moisture is in the infield clay or skin.”
Like any lawn or garden, it’s the goal of the Segra Stadium staff to keep the grass healthy. That includes watering, mowing, getting dirt out of the grass — your typical lawn maintenance. But to maintain a quality playing surface, there are a few more things they do.
“What we really focus on that really makes the surface good is the root zone,” Alpha says. “The roots are where all the energy is stored for the plants, the nutrients. On non-game days, we’re doing things to make sure nutrients are getting to the roots. On game days, we’re doing everything we can to that grass to make the ball roll as good on that as well.”
There are two processes staff undergo on weeks when the Woodpeckers are on the road: aerifying and verticutting. Lawn care aficionados may be familiar with aerifying, poking holes in the grass to allow air to cycle through the plant to encourage re-growth. This will often be seen on golf courses prior to the busy summer season.
In verticutting, the grass is sliced in vertical lines to force the rhizomes and stolons (the building blocks of the Bermuda grass that covers the Segra Stadium field) to re-tighten. In the course of play, player cleats pull up bits of grass and dirt from the field. Verticutting allows the grass to regrow in a way that forms a tight, compact playing surface.
Throughout both aerifying and verticutting, staff also lays down fertilizer and does the normal watering. Finally, they will use a roller — like one used to build an asphalt parking lot — to finish the compacting process.
Finally, the warning track is checked for bumps or dips. Alpha says they seek to avoid tripping hazards and reach a firmness that, for the players, is like going from carpet to a hardwood floor.
“You want it to be noisy but firm so it warns the player,” he says, referencing why it’s called a “warning track.” “It gives them stability to make a play on the ball but at the same time it gives them that warning.”
The grounds crew will make adjustments throughout the year with feedback from players, managers, and umpires, a group that plays a role in who wins the award that Alpha took home.
A baseball field at your home?
Can the Segra Stadium grass, for example, get replicated at home? Yes, Alpha says, but you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.
“The biggest difference between our yard here and the average yard in Fayetteville is what’s underneath the grass,” he says. “Ours is 100% sand. There is no dirt. We don’t have any clay, things like that. Unless you build it like ours, you’re not going to be able to duplicate it the same.”
Two more important parts: Alpha has a whole team, and, relatively, a lot of time and resources. The Segra Stadium grounds crew is made up of Alpha, Coordinator of Field Operations Eli Laney, and five part-time staff each season. They’ve also got a whole storeroom of fertilizer and equipment to take care of that field. If you want to make your own baseball field that lasts a whole year, it’s going to take a year-round effort.
“You’re going to have to be like us,” he says. “You’re going to have to stay on it, you’re going to have to maintain it. It takes a lot of effort. It is not, ‘Oh, I think I’ll mow on Saturday morning,’ and then not think about it again until next Saturday. It’s a daily thing, it’s ‘a pay attention to it thing.’”
That dedication to the job — long days before and after games, hours spent at the field on weeks when the team is away — is part of the reason Alpha was honored.
“We are very thankful for the hard work Alpha and the entire field staff put in throughout the season to make the diamond at Segra Stadium one of the best in the Minor Leagues,” said Woodpeckers General Manager Michelle Skinner. “The field has received compliments from fans and players since the first days of the ballpark in 2019, and that’s a credit to the pride Alpha takes in his work.”
Peter Woodford, the senior vice president of minor league operations and development, said in a November 2023 press release honoring Jones and other award recipients that groundskeeper “efforts are appreciated and do not go unnoticed by players and coaches throughout the Minor Leagues.”
After all, the field is for those players and coaches. The players who come through Segra Stadium are often at or near the beginning of their professional baseball journey, on the way to what they hope is a long and successful career at the highest level of their profession. That includes Houston Astros stars like 2022 World Series MVP Jeremy Peña and fellow World Series winners Cristian Javier and Jake Meyers. If the infield is not smooth or the grass is too wet, that could lead to an unnecessary error that reflects badly on a prospect or a torn ligament that puts a player on the shelf for a significant length of time.
The field is also part of an investment from the Astros themselves, a team that has cultivated a lot of recent success and championship-caliber baseball. (Side note: Alpha and all Astros’ major and minor league field operations staff were given replica championship rings from the Astros’ American League Championship Series wins in 2019 and 2022 and their World Series triumph in the latter year.) When Alpha says, “You have to be like us,” it means you have to be like the best.
Any advice for those of us who don’t have the time, resources, and support Alpha and the Woodpeckers do?
“The main thing I tell people is to not necessarily try to duplicate what we have but try to get close,” he says. “Do a soil test. Find out what the pH is. The local extension agency will give you feedback on what’s in your yard based on the soil test. If you follow what’s in there and make the adjustments to get it to a better pH level, then you can get a little bit closer.”
In the meantime, take in a game at Segra Stadium and enjoy, if not the baseball, the work of an award winner.
“It is not my award, it’s a team award,” Alpha says.
