Safeco Field gets a makeover for Seattle Bowl
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What would have been a warning-track fly ball in September could be a touchdown pass this month.
What was foul territory two months ago has become fair game for a goal-line stand.
More than the game has changed at Safeco Field, site of the Seattle Bowl on Dec. 27 as the field undergoes a facelift for the first football game in its 3-year history. The pitching mound has been leveled and the field has sprouted a goalpost. Yesterday, the grounds crew began painting the 5-yard markers, turning the infield into the red zone.
Ready for football? Not quite, but it's getting closer for the Seattle Bowl, which has migrated from Hawaii and has No. 12 Stanford playing Georgia Tech at 1 p.m. (ESPN).
Next year the bowl game is scheduled to move to the Seahawks' new stadium, which makes this game a one-shot chance for football at Safeco Field.
"It's going to be a real curiosity," said Bob Aylward, Mariners executive vice president of business operations. "I'm like everybody else, I want to see how this ends up laying out when it's fully striped and everything. Everyone is just kind of curious."
It's a bowl-game solution as temporary as the aluminum goalposts purchased for the game, but the field is starting to take shape for football. Stanford officials visited on Tuesday, and Georgia Tech administrators were in town yesterday.
"It has all been in the theory phase," said Chuck Nelson, former Huskies kicker and member of the Seattle Bowl committee. "Now you've got the schools coming here, and you've got the stripes on the field. It smells like grass and looks like a ball field."
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"The great thing about Safeco — but the challenge of it, too — is that the seats are very close to the field," said Fritz Rohlfing, co-owner of the Seattle Bowl. "That's why we felt it would be so great."
The northwest corner of the field comes within about 20 feet of seats near the left-field foul pole. The southeast corner of the field will be so close to the seats on the first-base line that a rolled tarp likely will be moved so there is the required six feet of space between the edge of the field and the wall.
Football isn't a perfect fit at Safeco since there is a gap between the seats in right field and the playing field. But upper-deck seats in center field will be almost ideal since they're at the 50-yard line, and the left-field seats are elevated enough to prevent any obstruction of seeing plays in the far end zone.
And not all signs of baseball will be erased as the bowl committee decided not to pay for turf to be installed on the infield, which will remain a dirt surface.
Other surface changes are more subtle. The grass has grown about three-eighths of an inch longer for the football game, from 1-1/8 in baseball to the 1-½ currently. Sand has also been added for extra protection against the grind of football players.
"You just have bigger boys out there on the football field," said Bob Christofferson, Safeco Field's head groundskeeper.
The bigger players also wear bigger cleats and tear up bigger chunks of turf. Not that anyone is worried. Even if the sod had to be replaced, there would be plenty of time to bring new grass from Olympia as late as February and it would be ready for the first exhibition games in March.
"We would never play a football game in here if it jeopardized whether it could be ready for baseball," Christofferson said. "The most important thing to emphasize is that the field is going to be perfect for baseball next spring."
The wear will be limited to one day as the two teams will practice at different sites in the week leading up to the game. Some local high-school fields such as Memorial Stadium are a possibility as is Washington's new indoor practice facility. Those arrangements have not been finalized.
But for about three hours this December, two teams from opposite ends of the country will converge to play the first football game at the stadium that led Major League Baseball in attendance as the Seattle Bowl pays the Mariners to use the facility.
"It's part of why we exist," Aylward said. "The Mariners and those 81 regular-season games are the center ring, but that's not all we do."
Danny O'Neil can be reached at 206-515-5536 or doneil@seattletimes.com.