The Keeper of the Diamond: Forty Summers Tending the Oakland Oaks' Field

Long before the first player arrives, before the concession stands open or the public-address system crackles to life, Walter Hines is already walking the outfield grass at the Oakland Oaks' home field. He carries a rake in one hand and a paper cup of coffee in the other, and he moves with the unhurried certainty of a man who has made this walk thousands of times.

Hines, now in his sixties, has tended this diamond since the league's earliest seasons. He predates every player on the current roster by decades, and he has outlasted eight managers, three outfield renovations, and more rain delays than he cares to count. To the Oaks, he is less an employee than an institution.

A Craft Measured in Inches

Groundskeeping, Hines will tell you, is a craft of small margins. The height of the infield grass affects how a bunt rolls. The moisture in the clay around home plate changes how a catcher's cleats grip during a throw to second. The slope of the mound, regraded after every homestand, can quietly alter a pitcher's command. "People think I cut grass," Hines said. "What I do is control the game before it starts."

He learned the trade from his father, who tended municipal ballfields across the East Bay. Hines took the Oaks job as a young man intending to stay a season or two. Forty summers later, he says he never found a reason to leave. "Every spring the grass comes back, and I come back with it," he said. "There's a rhythm to it. I'd miss it too much."

Players speak of him with genuine affection. Third baseman Omar Tavares, a newcomer this summer, said Hines greeted him on his first morning with advice about the quirks of the infield. "He told me exactly how a ball takes a hop off the dirt near the bag. He was right. That's the kind of thing you can't learn from a scouting report," Tavares said.

Hines keeps a weathered notebook in which he records weather patterns, grass conditions, and the tendencies of the field across the years. He can tell you which corner of the outfield drains slowest after a storm and which patch of foul territory bakes hardest under an August sun. The notebook, he says, is the only scouting report he has ever needed.

He has no plans to retire, though he acknowledges the mornings come harder than they once did. The Oaks have offered to hire an assistant, and Hines has reluctantly agreed to train one, mostly so the knowledge in that notebook does not vanish with him. "Somebody has to keep the field honest," he said. "A good field doesn't lie to the players. That's all I've ever tried to give them." As the sun climbed over the center-field fence, he tucked the notebook into his back pocket and went back to raking, erasing a footprint only he had noticed.