The Blue Jays are looking to install a natural grass field inside Rogers Centre by 2018.
Lyons, one of Canada’s top turfgrass experts, is leading an ambitious experiment by the Toronto Blue Jays to see what it would take to grow real grass inside Rogers Centre in time for the 2018 season. It’s a tall order, and probably one of the most watched sports field transformation projects in North America.
Lyons says the biggest challenge will go to the engineers who need to retrofit a stadium that was never designed to grow grass. Among their hurdles will be figuring out how to deal with the extra humidity created by millions of blades of grass, how to give it enough light, how to lower the Roger Centre’s concrete floor and get it to drain properly.
Growing grass indoors is easy enough, Lyons said – they can already do that inside Guelph’s space-age plant labs, where scientists manipulate the light, humidity and water fed to grass sprouts in big, white-walled metal boxes that look like walk-in freezers.
Using these multi-million-dollar growth chambers, they can mimic the exact conditions of the Rogers Centre. Those experiments will help researchers decide which blend of grasses are the best fit for the Blue Jays, and provide data to the engineers who need to build the stadium infrastructure to keep the plants alive.
Lyons is confident it can be done, and done on time, but admits the logistics of retrofitting Rogers Centre in the off-season will be tough. He knows success isn’t certain, and plenty of indoor stadiums have failed at it before.
“Hopefully, we can learn from their mistakes. The Blue Jays want to do this right,” he said.