Hours after Albert Pujols offered optimism and a polite word of warning about the Texas Rangers, his fears about the state of the team actually came true.
“They have a great ball club. The front office has done a great job to put a great team together, to compete,” Pujols said. “But, like every other ball club, they think they have a chance to win a World Series. At the end of the day, it’s about staying healthy.
“They have a great starting rotation. They spent a lot of money, but can they stay healthy, especially in that stadium on that turf? Sometimes it’s a little tough. Wish them the best and hopefully those guys can stay healthy.”
Wait. What?
The turf?
He said it.
A few hours after Pujols made this comment to my benign query about the state of his former American League West opponent, Rangers shortstop Corey Seager went out and got himself hurt.
In the fifth inning of the Rangers’ win over the Kansas City Royals on Tuesday night, Seager hit a ball down the left field line that should have been a triple, at least. On his way to second base, Seager appeared to suffer a pulled hamstring and he stopped at second.
Seager left the game on his power, and the Rangers said he suffered “hamstring tightness.”
That injury is the only thing that has gone wrong for the Rangers to start the season. The Rangers won Tuesday night to improve to 7-4, good for first place in the AL West.
Just think, if the season ended today the Rangers would be AL West champs’. Only 151 games remaining and this thing is done.
Pujols spoke on the Rangers during a conference call with local media to promote the 2023 Invited Celebrity Classic, a golf tournament featuring a mix of celebrities and pros next week at Las Colinas Country Club in Irving.
Seager’s injury had nothing to do with the turf, but Pujols’ comments warrant a closer look.
I asked him what about the surface at Globe Life Mall is different than the other parks in Major League Baseball.
“As any player will tell you they prefer to play on natural grass than turf,” he said. “Obviously, it’s not the turf when I got into the league. You know, that hard turf that you feel like is concrete.”
Because it was concrete.
When Pujols was a rookie with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2001, the artificial surfaces in Major League Baseball were still that old, painful, AstroTurf; that was a thin carpet over a concrete floor.
Teams moved away from AstroTurf because it was the root cause of countless injuries.
However, in this era the teams that prefer to save money will use a Sport Turf, an improvement over AstroTurf. Also, Sport Turf is inferior to grass.
Pujols concluded his 22-year major league career last season. He serves as a special-assistant to the Angels. He terrorized the Rangers considerably, and is familiar both with this new team, and its still-new ballpark.
The Rangers are one of five teams in MLB that plays on a synthetic surface. The others are Arizona, Miami, Toronto and Tampa Bay.
“In the long run, especially if you play 81 games, it’s something that in the long run will hurt you,” Pujols said. “I can tell you from experience, when I went and played whether it was in Texas or Toronto, or Tampa, leaving there three days after (a series), whether it was my hamstring or my back, it gets tight. That is something that can affect you as (the season goes).”
Before moving into Globe Life Mall in 2020, the team played on real grass both at Arlington Stadium and The Ballpark.
When they were building Globe Life Mall, the club announced toward the end of its completion that the Rangers would play on a synthetic surface.
Team officials met with the players to explain the decision, and publicly the club claimed they could not grow real grass because of the depth of the playing surface. Turf experts from Texas A&M openly disputed such claims.
The benefit to a Sport Turf is money. It’s expensive, less expensive than real grass, but it allows teams to quickly change the venue from baseball to any other number of options.
When the Rangers built Globe Life Mall, the primary goal was to be able to host an array of events, and to be open beyond the 83 games they usually play every season (the regular season is 81 home games, and a team normally hosts a pair of exhibition dates.)
Having a Sport Turf makes changing out the building quick, easy, and ... cost effective.
Sport Turf is not the reason Corey Seager hurt his hamstring, and it won’t be the reason the Rangers do or don’t ultimately build a World Series winner, but you may have noticed there are only five out of 30 teams that still play on it.
