Baseball Insider: Fenway groundskeeper living his dream

[CincyRedsFan30]

Fenway groundskeeper living his dream

By Hal McCoy

Dayton Daily News

BOSTON | Dave Mellor was the same as 99.9 percent of the boys who played baseball when he was growing up in Piqua.

"I was a baseball fanatic, pitched at Piqua High School, and my grandfather, William, played for the Baltimore Orioles in 1902 and my dream was to make it to the majors like my grandfather," he said.

The dream was dashed a month after Mellor graduated from Piqua during a trip to McDonald's in Troy. Instead of getting a Big Mac, he got hit by a car.

"Not only was my leg crushed, my dreams were crushed. I was mad at the world, why me?" he said. "I could no longer reach for my dream."

His dream was a nightmare, seven surgeries in 2½ years. He walked with crutches 2½ years, walked with a cane for 2½ months.

"There was a lot of time to think during all that physical therapy," he said. "My two brothers and my mother said, 'Adversity makes you stronger, and look at it as a challenge. Don't give up. Look at it as a detour, not a road block. Reach for your dreams and find a career you love.' "

And that's when Mellor turned to grass. And that's how he ended up as the head groundskeeper in Fenway Park — keeper of the grass on baseball's most sacred turf.

"I mowed grass as a kid and loved being outside, I loved baseball and science was my favorite subject in school," he said. "I thought, 'Gosh, somebody has to take care of a major-league field.' "

It became Mellor's personal Field of Dreams.

College was delayed three years due to the surgeries before he enrolled at Ohio State to study landscape horticulture and agronomy.

To pursue his new dream, Mellor inundated the Milwaukee Brewers with cards and letters because a brother, Terry, lived in Milwaukee and offered him his basement.

The Brewers gave him a job in 1984 and he began climbing the grass ladder, mowing and trimming and nurturing old Milwaukee County Stadium for 16 years.

Then he encountered another car.

He was working in Milwaukee County Stadium in 1995 in left field when he heard a car roaring through an open gate.

"I ran to the warning track and put my hands up and this lady, smiling right at me, stomped on the gas and came right at me," he said.

Mellor landed in a heap at the base of the left-field wall.

"She told police she was there to do a stunt for a movie and if it wasn't successful she was supposed to kill herself," said Mellor. "She had a history. She was arrested in Miami in 1990 for stalking Julio Iglesias, she was arrested in 1991 for threatening the Queen of England, demanding to be adopted, and the night before she hit me she tried to accost Oprah Winfrey in Chicago."

Mellor was in good company, but the off-shoot was five more knee surgeries and as of this week he has had 19 knee surgeries. He now has an artificial right knee. Mix in a foot surgery and two back surgeries.

Stop him?

When old Riverfront Stadium was being converted from AstroTurf to grass, the Cincinnati Reds offered him the head groundskeeper position. Negotiations lagged and at the 11th hour the Red Sox called, the ninth team to talk to him about leaving Milwaukee.

"The Fenway opportunity was overwhelming. This is literally the next best thing to playing and I still get goose bumps walking on the field," he said. "I grew up a Red Sox fanatic, just a fanatic. Being in the majors is exciting, but to come to Boston and take care of Fenway Park is more than words can express."

The Green Monster? A special story.

"Radiant heat comes off it," said Mellor. "It is 10 degrees warmer near the wall than by the first-base foul line. In the winter, it is our friend. We stack snow 20 feet high against the Green Monster and even if it's zero, if the sun is out, it will melt it down.

"But we get a lot of ice in Boston and ice and grass don't mix," he said. "What excites me is that we built a whole new field last year, excavated out 18 million pounds of soil. Before, if we got a quarter inch of rain it wasn't unusual to dump five to 10 tons of kitty litter-type drying agent on the grass or to bring in a helicopter to fly over the grass for six to eight hours to dry it."

Fenway has a high water table from the Bay of Boston and it leaked into the soil. An entire new field was built, a 13-day project — drainage tiles, three inches of peat gravel that was laser-leveled, nine inches of sand that was laser-leveled and then sod.

Proud? Mellor is like a worm on a golf green. And he is an author, writing two books on grass-growing and lawn-mowing.

To him, watching grass grow is exciting.

Contact Hal McCoy by e-mail at hmccoy@DaytonDailyNews.com

[Fishercat]

Very good story by Hal.

[CincyRedsFan30]

There really is a reason he's in the HOF, despite what some seem to think.

[QuietAcre]

I smell a "restraining order" coming against one particular poster here, veeerrrryyy soon.