Fueling the Isotopes

0:00A vital ingredient to success in sports is hidden in plain sight. Turf grass is critical for safety and playability and keeping it pristine is not easy. It's an all-encompassing passion for Thomas Gallegos in New Mexico. I do feel like I'm living a dream. You know, a baseball field every day. I can't ask for anything better than that. Welcome to Redox Gros, I'm Jim Morris, Thomas's story and his secrets to success are next. I'm at Rio Grande Credit Union Field at Isotope's Park in Albuquerque, New Mexico, visiting with Thomas Gallegos. Thomas, thank you for your time. Thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me. This is manager of field operations here ensuring the playing surfaces impeccably maintain.

1:00It is a lot of work. This is the home field of the Albuquerque Isotopes. They're in the Pacific Coast League. They're affiliated with Colorado Rockies in Major League Baseball. So Thomas, you grew up watching this team play. Tell me about that experience and now you're here with a major position. Yeah, growing up, coming to the ballpark a few times a year, catching some games. Never once thought I'd have this big of a roll at the ballpark. Even growing up in my later teenage years, I still kind of didn't know what I wanted to do right and then all of a sudden. When, here we are, and been full swing and just really blessed to be here. I joined the game day grounds crew back in 2019. I was 18 years old. Really opened my eyes. It was a huge eye opener to like, wow, this is what I can do. This is what I can be passionate about. In the infield dirt, to mound play and watching how these guys maintained it, I was like, wow, this is something I really want to do. Now you're 27 years of age, a lot of hard work and you're all in attitude.

2:04You're now one of the youngest head ground keepers in all of minor league baseball. And now you really get the long hours, right? Baseball brings really long hours over here, 13, 14 hours a day. Sometimes more than that. Depending on weather and certain conditions, but the long hours have set in and I think the crew is ready for the off season. When you do your job right, you may not necessarily get a lot of feedback. Is that right? I mean, if the field is in poor condition, you'll hear from everybody. If the field's in great condition, you may get some comments, but that may not happen as well. Do you struggle with that at all? I mean, you certainly have a job to do and when you do it well, you know, those in the know, understand the importance of it. Some of fans view and from people that aren't on the playing surface, we always get compliments. Hey, the field's looking awesome. Feel looks great. But when you're out there, you're down there with players, coaches, they have a different view, obviously. And this year we've had a ton of success on the field. Every visiting team that comes in is really impressed.

3:07Even them knowing like that we play soccer here, you know, we do two sports. So it's even more impressive to them that they come in here and they see the field and how it's playing just to know that we were able to host two sports and then have a great playing surface is something special. You oversee a crew of nearly two dozen people. Tell me about what that looks like and then also how many hours a week do you work at peak season? So yeah, I got 22 guys just about, I got a full time assistant, his name's Chase and then I got four other seasonal assistants and the rest of the guys are game day assistants. And yeah, the hour stack while we're in a homestand. I mean, we got 10 of us here a night for a game. The game day staff usually hear for about eight hours and mean my assistant like sever here for about 13 give or take depending on the length of the game, weather conditions, stuff like that. Managing those guys has been easier than it has in the past. I've really built a great crew at my assistant chase is a really great guy.

4:11He's got a hold of managing the game day guys as well. So it's been easier than it has in the past. I think just building that foundation, building a good crew in the guys have been great. By the way, like these guys, they know the goal, they know the objective, they know what we want to do every day. It's just getting everyone on the same page and showing up and saying, hey, this is what we got today. Let's go knock it out. If you took online classes from the Ohio State University and that is a major achievement. It's a great program. How helpful was all of that? What comments do you have about the support the team gave you? Maisley baseball once, every head guy to have some sort of educational background, which I didn't have. And that's when the tops and my GM at the time signed me up for Ohio State University. The Rockies, Pedro Lopez, our team manager, those guys had my back. They were all in full support of making me the guy. Having everyone behind my back definitely helped, you know, and made the exception for Maisley baseball to say, okay, hey, put Thomas in it and in the Ohio State class.

5:14At least get him through that and he could take over that role. And obviously with turf grass management, you're continuing your education all the time. I feel like you're never going to stop learning with this type of job. So that's the mindset I keep. Just keep learning year after year. I mean, hands on with the job every day has taught me so much more than a laptop could have ever, you know. And I don't get me wrong, I appreciate the program. It did teach me a lot. But I just feel like the hands on experience and tracking data on an actual field. I mean, the hands on experience there is just, you can't buy that, you know, you can't learn that on the computer. The biggest challenge of my job is doing two sports. We don't have as much time to do cultural practices or stick to a really good game plan on fertility. The field use is through the roof, you know.

6:15So it creates just a variety of different challenges that we see. And then having to turn around from a Saturday soccer game to a Tuesday baseball game, it's just a quick turnaround. And yeah, like I said, the cruise here, we're all here. We're working our butts off to try to get it to that, to that higher standard for baseball. The transition's tough. I mean, we run into, to where area is we run into broken valves on the warning track because we're driving on it. Like it's an interstate. It just comes with so many different challenges having to do these conversions. It's come a long way. We used to have to take out the pitching mound and rebuild that every week. We stopped doing that. We pushed the surface out more towards the outfield. So the mound stays put now, thankfully. But before that, it was quite a challenge to build the pitches mound every other week. And then just to wear on the turf, you know, the infield we were able to manage that a little better than the outfield.

7:15But when it comes to the outfield, it has just been getting hammered with just wear and tear from that soccer. It's completely different sport than baseball. What are some of the things that you look for to make sure that you're doing your job right? When I'm out here every day, I'm looking for a disease pressure. I'm looking for any sort of hot spots we call them, anything that's dry out here. We do a lot of hand watering. I'm kind of have to stand top the hand watering. The temperatures this summer have been through the roof. I think we've had 10 to 1200 degree days, which is above average for us. We've just, the heat hasn't stopped. We have had minimal rain this year. Hasn't helped us at all. It's been a tough summer. I'm not going to lie. But we're surviving some keys to great turf for a discipline program. If you have a discipline program, when it comes to fertility, pesticides, cultural packs, you should find some success there, absolutely.

8:17And you are working with Redox, TJ Winsler, our Southwest agronomist. You've converted more than a dozen fields to Redox turf or X products. How important is good nutrition in what you do? It's the most important thing. I think it's key factor. You've got to have the right nutrition going into the plant and knowing what's available to the plant at the time. I think working with TJ has been awesome. TJ is a great guy. He's helped us figure some stuff out. We're starting to make some more database decision making around here. Doing soil samples. What does a turf need? What's the soil saying? What's the leaf saying? And then going from there and making decisions based off of that, which has been huge. Customer service is, I think, a lost art in a lot of our society. How important is it when you can reach TJ? You can talk about the technology. You can share ideas, kick things around and make sure you're comfortable with it. How important is that process as well as having the scientific backing that what you're

9:17putting on is going to work? Having those conversations are great. Just having the door open, hey, I can call TJ or send TJ a picture of this. Hey, TJ, I'm seeing this. And getting some feedback within the day or if not within the hour is awesome. It's huge to have him just in my pocket like that and just being available. Really big for our program. And there's a couple guys like TJ having my contacts and some golf course guys that are local here that I can give a shout to. So the turf community in general is just awesome. A bunch of guys that are all willing to help and lend their two cents when it comes to turf management. And I always appreciate that big time. It is a huge help to have someone like that available. Your Redox program has six products, Osmo Pro, Lynx, Pentechal, Platinum, RDXN, and SI. This turf is under a lot of stress. So how well is all the program working to help those areas? So far so good. I mean, everything's everything that I see.

10:19The turf is doing what it needs to do, which is great. We're growing at a rate that's manageable. We're not overgrowing by any means, right? We're not pushing so much growth that we're mowing every single day and it's uncontrollable. So that's nice. I just think we've been able to kind of to get it to a point where when I'm spraying and applying those products, I feel confident in knowing, okay, this is really going to benefit the turf over the next few weeks. I get excited to go out and spray now just so I can see the benefits really starting to see the effects of it now, I think, are really starting to show. And it's nothing but positive. We have great color out of the turf, strong roots, and overall just a healthy, healthy leaf and it's playing great. Like I said, the guys have nothing bad to say when it comes to playability. Make sure the guys who are out here on the surface are safe. Not going to get hurt, roll, nank, or anything like that. And also playability, right? How the balls roll and how the fields play in critical for what we're trying to accomplish

11:20out here. You have a lot of work to do. Your crew has a lot of work to do when you can have the labor savings. How valuable is that? It's very valuable. Not having to cut the grass every day is nice. Although we do cut it three, four times a week. We cut it every day when the baseball teams in town. When we could save time on mowing, that's great. No one really thinks about the dirt too much, but I think 80 to 90% of our day is spent on the dirt when the teams in town. From the mound to plate, the infield skin, bullpen's warning track, it's all touched every single day. When we just got to show up and all we think about is did the irrigation run, check, then we got a mow check and then it's off the grass, right? Then we're not even thinking we're trying to get the dirt ready. So it's nice to have that and not worry about the turf too much when we got a lot of other things going on. There's an article and I want to quote from it. This was from the Santa Fe, New Mexican. This is a quote, the lines are smooth. The ground perfectly manicured the grass uniform and neat.

12:21It's what you might expect a carpeted fairway at Augusta National might look and feel like. To a baseball purist with an untrained eye, it's simply breathtaking. That is high praise. When you really hit it and you do it well, how does it make you feel? It feels incredible, right? I think we all want to strive for perfection. We're never going to get there, but we strive for it. When you can get as close as you can get and the field's freshly mowed and everything's looking really good and we have a game and everyone's complimenting you or we have, like we had last week, we have low rider night out here. We had cars lined up, 40 cars on the warning check. We had fans down on the field and everyone just being super complimentary of the surface and the grass and the edges and everything maintained. It's a satisfying feeling. You played baseball? Tell me about that and is it nice to continue working in baseball for your profession? Absolutely. I played baseball growing up as a kid.

13:24I'm going to be a professional baseball player. That got cut short. That was fine. I got a bike car when I was 14. Broke my leg, stopped playing after that. My first step back into the ballpark was as a groundskeeper and I'm so glad it ended up that way. I just appreciate every day out here. I really think I'm truly blessed to be out here and I get to show up to a ballpark every day and that's just something I never really thought I'd be able to do and it's like a dream come true. I'm so lucky to have all these great people in my life. You know, it's got to be the number one thing for me. It's just the people I've met. Well they're lucky to have you as well. Nice to visit with you Thomas. Thanks and appreciate it. It was awesome to see how ingrained the isotopes are in their community. We are excited to help Thomas and his crew do their job so very well.

14:24That will wrap up this episode. Thank you to Thomas. We are at redoxgroze.com. You can email us at podcast at redoxgroze.com as well. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.