SPRINGFIELD — Aaron Lowrey typically has a small afternoon block where he can leave Hammons Field, grab something to eat, recharge, and come back to prepare for a 7 o’clock first pitch.
Opening Day, however, is it’s own thing.
“You have to be ready for the open house that every event is,” he said.
The Missouri State graduate and Maysville, Mo. native started as an assistant groundskeeper with the Springfield Cardinals in 2005 and now serves as Director of Stadium Operations.
But he’ll be the first to tell you it takes a village… or, in this case, an entire nest of Cardinals to make the three-time Double A Ballpark of the Year shine. As you’d expect, that process starts long before even the players arrive.
“It’s surprising how, after six months of offseason, nothing works anymore,” Director of Ballpark Operations Aaron Lowrey said. “But we’re going, we’re ready, and we’re happy to serve our fans.”
There are gates to unlock, deliveries to tend and, sometimes, for Lowrey to move himself with a forklift. The visitor’s dugout, also reserved for the Missouri State Bears, was freshly painted on Thursday.
Other fixes directly affect the game, like repairing bullpen phones.
Once the 50-75 other employees check in, they clean seats, prepare concession stands, the team shop, and fire up the ever-growing list of ballpark eats.
It comes down to the smallest of details, just like the game itself. Lowrey is a detail-oriented man. He gave a physics lesson on how the massive new poles that hold up the expanded netting were transported. It’s all about finding the center in weight distribution, something he learned growing up on his family farm in Maysville.
“A great deal of baseball fans are very observant. A lot of what we do to keep things clean and painted, they may never notice it, but if you didn’t do it, they would definitely notice that you hadn’t done it.”
It’s a summer-long marathon, but what would the job be without a little time to actually sit back and enjoy the result?
“We use the phrase ‘sustained excellence.’ That’s something Mike Matheny will talk about. We’re not a flash in the pan. We’ve been doing this for 11 years going into our 12th and we’re going to keep doing things the right way.”
