How Bugs Drive Baseball Batty

Each ballpark has a distinctive bug profile, dictated by climate, architecture and other variables. Whether open to the air or domed, plastic-turfed or grassed, each stadium supports an ecology not precisely like any other.

Of course, baseball's three domed stadiums—Houston's Astrodome, Minnesota's Metrodome and Seattle's King-dome—generally have few problems related to insects. The Kingdome's facility director, Ron Cline, said, "To be honest, we have some problems with rodents—we get rats from the docks—but insects, I don't notice a problem comparable to other stadiums'." The Metro-dome in Minneapolis also has pretty much succeeded in banishing bugs. The stadium's roof is supported by 20 electric fans that produce a positive roof-raising air pressure of three to six pounds per square foot inside the entire Dome. This causes a stiff outbound breeze to blow whenever an outside door or window is opened. "I'm sure it's virtually impossible for a mosquito or fly to get into the Metrodome," said John O'Reilly of Plunkett Exterminators, the Dome's official exterminator. "They can't go against the wind."

It occurred to me that an interesting contrast in ballparks and their insect life might best be found in a comparison of one park that has real grass with one carpeted with ersatz turf. Quite arbitrarily I selected Comiskey Park in Chicago for the natural grass environment and Royals Stadium in Kansas City for the artificial. I invited local entomologists to explore the life and times of the bugs at each site.

For the Comiskey Park expedition, I enlisted as my guide one of the country's leading urban entomologists. Dr. Gary Bennett of Purdue University. The twilight sky was overcast when we stepped onto the field during batting practice before a game between the White Sox and the Texas Rangers. At the short, padded wall behind home plate, where Dr. Bennett gently kicked a loose pad, a cloud of fungus, gnats and midges flew out. They were followed immediately by a sludge-loving yellow-and-black syrphid fly.

Bennett looked up quickly. "Hello! There goes a mosquito hawk!" he said, as a big, gangly bug drifted above us and flew off toward the outfield. In the grass behind the batting cage, Bennett flushed up some bugs with his foot and said, "Uh-oh, they've got planthoppers!" He brushed his foot over the grass again. Sproing! A grasshopper. He moved his foot a third time. A cloud of gnats rose up toward us. "Boy, have they got a lot of turf pests!" he chortled.

The visiting team's dugout yielded a striped cucumber beetle. "What's he doing here?" Bennett asked. "He should be feasting on a zucchini somewhere."

When the tour was over, the professor was ecstatic in his assessment of Comiskey Park. "It's an entomologist's paradise," he said.

Royals Stadium was not that at all. I went there one summer afternoon with two entomologists from Kansas State University, Judy Bertholf and Bill Ramoska. They came equipped with a minimum of gear—guidebooks, jars, tweezers, a camera, a flashlight. The ersatz playing surface—a petroleum product—seemed about as welcoming to a bug as a glass of turpentine to a wine connoisseur. While it is true that moths and carpet beetles chewed up part of the Tartan Turf rug at Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium after it opened in 1970, laboratory improvements supposedly have since made the carpet insectproof. Nothing was to be seen on the field at Royals Stadium, so we went into the stands and the tunnels. Again, nothing. Bertholf was shaking her head. Was she indicating that Royals Stadium was devoid of bugs?

"Oh, no, it's got bugs," she said comfortingly.

Sure enough, in a cool, dark tunnel behind the Royals' dugout, Bertholf spotted a large, flat, oval bug cowering against a concrete wall. Moving with the grace of a shortstop, she pounced on the specimen. "This is the German cockroach," she said in calm, clinical tones.