Oriole Park at Camden Yards is naked right now

What do you call a baseball field without any grass? If you played in the kind of rec Little League that I did as a kid, you probably just call it a baseball field, but it’s one thing to have an all-dirt infield at the local elementary school and another thing entirely to see no grass at all on the field at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

If you haven’t heard about it before right now, all of the sod is being replaced at Oriole Park between now and the beginning of December. It was just the sod’s time, is all.

The Orioles provided some facts about the sod replacement as the project got underway:

• The sod was last replaced after the 2008 season. The Orioles went 358-293 on the old sod.
• There is about 105,000 square feet of grass area at Camden Yards. This will be filled with about 400 tons of sod shipped from a sod farm in New Jersey.
• This sod will be 100% Kentucky bluegrass, in case any of you sod connoisseurs were curious.

Here are some pictures from the replacement effort. You want to know what looks weird without any grass? Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

These are some work-in-progress pictures, but anyone whose office is in the Warehouse on the side of the field gets this view of a completely naked field at Camden Yards today:

Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about whether the old sod was good luck, since the Orioles had three consecutive losing seasons to begin the old sod’s lifespan. When you put it that way, it’s actually kind of incredible that the team was able to turn around from that to having a winning record.

Maybe they can do even better than a .550 winning percentage on the new sod. Probably not, though.