The tarp weighs, by the crew’s own estimate, about as much as a marriage, and on Friday night in Cleveland, eleven people moved it across a baseball field in the time it takes a city to decide it believes in something.
They are the grounds crew, and they are the only people in professional baseball whose job description includes the weather. When the Guardians–Rays ALCS Game 4 was postponed to Saturday after a 9 p.m. announcement, the national cameras found the managers, the pitchers, the rain-delay pensive faces. The eleven people in yellow ponchos, who had been working the sky for an hour before anyone on television mentioned rain, went back to work.
The crew chief, who gave his name as Dale and gave nothing else, has done this at Progressive Field since the park had a river running through it. He describes the tarp deployment the way a surgeon describes an appendectomy: as a thing that is routine, fast, and the only reason the patient is alive.
“Everybody’s looking at the sky,” Dale said, standing in the middle of the infield with the tarp half-dragged behind him, forty thousand fans singing a song from 1997 above him. “We’re looking at the field. The sky’s not our problem. The field is our problem. The field’s always our problem.”
The crew is eleven. They are not on the roster. They do not get a ring, a parade, or a single line in the box score, and they have made peace with this in the specific way that people who work at night make peace with everything — by not talking about it, and by being extremely good at the thing.
The tarp itself is a marvel the league will not let you photograph properly: a blue synthetic sheet the size of a parking lot, on a spool, that a dozen people deploy in under ten minutes and that protects the infield from the one opponent in baseball no team has ever beaten. The grounds crew has a saying about the tarp that Dale declined to repeat on the record, and then repeated off the record, and it is not a saying about baseball.
By 11 p.m. the rain stopped. The crew came back — the same eleven, in the same ponchos, now dry on the inside — and raked the infield under the lights for a game that would not be played for twenty hours. They made a baseball field perfect at midnight for an audience of zero.
This is the part of the sport nobody sells tickets to. The series resumes Saturday, Cleveland leading 2-1. The tarp is folded, in a room under the stands, fully deployed in its own way, dreaming of the next sky.