Play It Green

Sometimes, it’s the little things. Like the fact that Earth Day (April 22) is in the same month as major league baseball’s opening day–just a couple weeks apart! (MLB opening day is April 4). Lots of clubs are touting their greenness now, some (much) more impressively than others. Let’s examine some of the contenders.

• The Cleveland Indians are giving away recycled hats at their April 17 game against the White Sox. Made from plastic bottles. This operates via reverse green psychology. A hat still qualifies as stuff that involves manufacture, packaging and delivery. But they do help to keep that super-charged sun off your face, so points there.

• On Earth Day, the Cincinnati Reds will offset their carbon emissions. And the event staff will “wear uniforms from fiber culled from recycled drink bottles.” That’s probably not as uncomfortable as it sounds. But is that seriously supposed to make an impact? A: Are these new, one-time use uniforms? Because that’s just a silly waste. B: Do baseball fans really care about the fiber in the staff uniforms?

• Target Field, new home to the Minnesota Twins, is heading for LEED certification. In part thanks to a rainwater recycling system that will reduce the need for municipal water by over 50% saving more than 2 million gallons of water annually. Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

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Here’s a look at some numbers behind baseball–from number of balls (ha!) to number of fans, to pounds of glass recycled. Shamelessly lifted from E’s professional-sports-by-the-numbers list.

160,000. Estimated number of baseballs used per season, about 5-6 dozen balls per game.

30. Approximate number of professional baseball and football teams that use artificial/synthetic turf.

80 million. Number of spectators that Major League Baseball attracts each year.

10. Approximate number of the 30 MLB teams that have “gone green,” according to the EPA.

30 million. Number of hot dogs estimated to be sold at MLB parks in 2008.

5,500. Amount of construction waste, in tons, recycled from the building of Nationals Park.

480,000. Pounds of carbon emissions created by the 18-block-long, 100% recycled “green” carpet for the 2008 All-Star Game Red Carpet Parade (though the emissions were offset through carbon credits).

18. Tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions reduced at Fenway Park stadium by installing solar thermal panels on the roof behind home plate.

180. Number of recyclable containers placed throughout the Pittsburgh Pirates ballpark to encourage recycling of plastic bottles and cans.

870. Pounds of glass the Pittsburgh Pirates recycled in 2008. Also recycled were 5,913 pounds of aluminum cans; 33,547 pounds of plastic; 3.61 tons of mixed paper; 193 tons of baled cardboard and skids of catalogs and 20,100 gallons of used cooking oil.

724. Days it took to build the Washington Nationals’ new ballpark, which was the first green professional stadium in the U.S. and LEED-silver certified by the U.S. Green Building Council.

30. Percentage of overall water consumption reduced by installing water-conserving plumbing fixtures, saving an estimated 3.6 million gallons of water per year at Nationals Park.

6,300. Number of square feet for a green roof above the Nationals’ concession/toilet area that minimizes roof heat gain.

590. Amount of solar panels installed at the San Francisco Giants’ AT&T Park, providing up to 120 kilowatts of energy that will be connected to San Francisco’s power grid.

100,000. Amount, in dollars, AT&T Park saved on garbage disposal fees in one year through its recycling program.

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I was all ready to write about the cacophonous silence coming from baseball players in regards to their teams’ green initiatives. With a LEED-certified stadium (silver) from the Nationals, Minnesota seeking their own new LEED stadium (gold), solar panels at Fenway, green power purchasing and major recycling at the Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park, 95% recycled steel at the Mets new Citi Field, and on and on across Major League Baseball, it seemed like a major loss that no players were acting as the spokespeople, that the conduit between teams’ green initiatives and fans were essentially PR people.

That’s no longer the case. Chris Dickerson from the Cinncinati Reds and Jack Cassel from the Cleveland Indians launched We Play Green, an initiative to get athletes–many of them baseball players–to make green changes to their everyday routines. They’re looking to bring environmental awareness to the locker rooms, to get players to shed their umpteen water bottles in favor of refillable bottles, to recycle, and to leverage their clout to get stadiums and city officials to do more. Geoff Jenkins of the Phillies is on board (his “inspiring” message: “I still recycle”), as is the Red Sox’ Jacoby Ellsbury (”I think many people think plastic just kind of melts away”), Joe Smith of the Mets (who quotes Art Bushwald, “and Man created the plastic bag…”) and Mike Aviles of the Cleveland Indians (”Everyone can do something”). It’s a major step for baseball, to put influential faces in front of these environmental efforts with people who have a lot more clout with fans than the guys and gals in the head office.

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The great bat debate is back, the inevitable facing off of the metal versus wood contingents. Pitchers, purportedly, are cowering in fear , praying that those ball-slamming aluminum bats will be banned in their neck of the woods this year, while college baseball teams are loathe to give up their hitting steaks. New York City banned metal bats in high school games last year, and Chicago is considering a similar ban, thanks to the pushing of one personal injury lawyer who happens to know an alderman. The whole wood-versus-metal issue has been studied extensively and can be mulled over here, but there are a couple of interesting points that stand out. Since aluminum bats were allowed in college baseball in 1974, home runs have increased–by a lot in some cases. During the 1998 College World Series at least 35 out of 111 CWS records were broken, and 17 more were tied. Both teams used Louisville Slugger aluminum bats. Also of interest, thanks to aluminum backs, the inside pitch grew a lot less effective.

But what about the environmental fallout? When it comes to wood, maple bats are known to shatter, sometimes dangerously (fans have even ended up with fractured jaws), and ash bats are the centerpiece of an environmental problem–an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer that has infected and killed millions of ash trees across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio and other eastern states. So here comes the big environmental solution: bamboo bats. Touted as the environmental alternative to all sorts of flooring and home goods thanks to bamboo’s easy growability (it’s not a tree, but a plant, and a terrifically hardy one at that), the company Sat-Bats claims their bamboo bats are stronger than ash and last longer, and are the environmental alternative to wood thanks to bamboo’s five-year growing period (as opposed to 40 for a mature tree) and low maintenance. Major League Baseball can’t adopt the bats because their one bat restriction is that “the bat shall be one piece of solid wood,” but other leagues can. So far, there haven’t been a lot of takers.

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Because we need fun receptacles to prevent us from throwing our bottles and cans in with the regular trash…enter the Fan Can. Nothing will make you want to recycle at a game like a can that’s all dressed up in your team colors with a festive helmet/baseball cap to boot! There are more than 100 of these cans stationed around Nationals Park–thanks to Coca Cola sponsorship–and they come in baseball player, football player or motor sports driver shapes. The Maryland Company that produces the cans clearly has hit on a brilliant green marketing mashup. But I’d take it one step further–Fan Can robots! Removes that inconvenient walking to the Fan Can altogether.

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The May/June issue of E Magazine is out which includes one of my favorite green sports stories of the moment–the new Yankee stadium and how it ruined the Bronx. Not only has the more-than-one-billion stadium proved a PR nightmare for the team, with entire empty sections acting as de facto rejection of outrageous ticket hikes–and the team’s direction–but to build the sterile monolith they cut down over 25 acres of parkland in the Bronx. Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates wrote to comment on the story today and said not a single replacement park has yet been opened–and won’t likely be for another 6 to 9 months. What’s more, those new parks promise synthetic turf, not grass and the mature elms and oaks that provided the only tree coverage in that Bronx neighborhood–and the only combat to terrible air quality. One of the saddest effects to me of this lost natural space in the city–the idea of the Yankees destroying local little league fields to build their new stadium. 

Of course most of the other new stadiums–including the Mets Citi Field–have done it right. Minnesota’s new park will open next year and is angling for a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold rating, an impressive feat. The Washington Nationals’ new ballpark only got LEED silver status.  

And former Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee has a few things to say about spoiled baseball players. “They’re afraid to walk down the street by themselves,” he said, explaining why they couldn’t be bothered with being environmental spokespeople.

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Ticket prices for Major League Baseball have reached levels of insanity never before imagined: the first nine rows for the new Yankee Stadium are priced between $500 and $2500, and that’s before scalpers get ahold of them. It may finally be time for baseball fans to launch a minor rebellion. There are some 190 minor league baseball teams playing in the U.S. (and 245 affiliated with major league teams) as opposed to just 30 MLB teams. That means there’s a much greater likelihood that you live closer to your minor league park, a park that can provide all the baseball-hotdog-beer-foam-finger-waving experience you crave complete with silly between-inning entertainment, wacky mascots and no residual feeling of depression after the team you just shelled out a paycheck’s worth of money to see bombed out or the over-enthusiastic fans started slugging each other and hurling expletives in front of your impressionable child.

Then there’s the question of travel. One mile driven alone in an SUV accounts for 1.6 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile, according to the Sightline Institute. In a car, it’s 1.2 pounds; 3 people carpooling equates to 0.4 pounds per passenger-mile. Baseball, as we all know, is a game of averages–and the average baseball stadium holds between 40,000 and 65,000 fans. All the recycling initiatives, efficiency lighting and solar thermal panels in the world can’t compensate for the fact that baseball fans spend a lot of time driving to and from stadiums, ratcheting up emissions as they go. Just as we’ve all become aware of “food miles” in recent years, meaning how far our produce has traveled from farm to plate, giving locally grown food an environmental upper hand, so going to minor league games has intrinsic green value. It’s also making a statement–that baseball is about the sport, the fun and the passion of the players. It’s not about who has the most money–players or fans–which is what it has, sadly, become.

My minor league team is the Bridgeport Bluefish who have a sweet little ballpark just ten minutes from my house in a formerly rundown industrial area in a struggling city. The Metro North train cruises past the outfield, blowing its whistle, ferries travel back and forth to Long Island behind left field, fireworks light up the sky on Friday nights and kids race around the bases between innings. The players come from all walks of life–some are teachers, construction workers, mechanics–others play baseball year round, in the Dominican Winter Baseball League during the off-season. They play through injuries, they play past their prime, they play here when the major leagues decide they’ve had enough of them. Yet there are often only a scattering of fans in the seats, while Yankee Stadium, over an hour away, is packed. A local revolution is in order.

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Here’s what Bill Lee said to me about the Fields of Green Team during our interview, before wandering into talk of canoes, speed and courteousness (as he’s wont to do):

“I’m not involved in that at all. I tried their product, we drove across the country, and it really doesn’t work. I think it’s a pyramid scam that was done by these guys that didn’t have any jobs, and they try to market and sell it, but as far as adding a little bit of extra water or hydrocarbon to your car, it sounds good in theory, but it’s still a combustion engine and that, in the long run, is not what I believe in.

I do not believe in the combustion engine—I kind of believe in a canoe with a paddle. Hand-carved. That’s as fast as I want to go in life. And as far as jet-skis, skidoos, I’ve never been on them, I never will be on them, and every time one of them would get out of control and hit the dam, my grandfather would applaud them. They’re going too fast. Stop and shake hands with everybody. That’s my theory. Don’t slip past people.”

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What’s cooler than girls’ baseball? From a family of four girls with a devout baseball-loving father (Yankees, in the era of Mantle and Ruth), the idea of not-being-able-to-be-a-baseball-player hung over us. Not me, so much, since I was the sort of kid who got polite applause for merely connecting with the ball, but for my sister, who hung a Ricky Henderson poster on her bedroom door and had a throwing arm like a speeding bullet. Sometimes, for kids, its the possibility that sustains you. Not to knock softball, but I’ve never understood why girls couldn’t simply play girls’ baseball. It turns out they have always played baseball, nearly as long as men, and to this day there is still a North American Women’s Baseball League. Who knew? Softball was started in the late 1880s as a balled up leather glove, that evolved into a way for men to play baseball inside. When time came to fund women’s and men’s sports equally under Title IX, women’s softball was seen as the equivalent to men’s baseball. There are a lot of historical tidbits on all this fascinating history here.  

 The most famous of the women’s baseball leagues, of course, was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, begun during WWII and with an 11-year history that only ended when the popularity of televised men’s baseball shuffled it out of existence. A League of Their Own, is, of course, an amazing tribute to this era of women in sports. Anyway, there is a green point in here. The company Vintage Blue has a whole line of tribute shirts to that great league, along with other shirts that echo the 40s and 50s, all made sustainably with 100% organic cotton, including chemical-free printing. And they donate 5% from every sale to the third-world loan program Kiva or Women Thrive Worldwide.

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At the start of the baseball season, I was given a whole back-stadium tour of Fenway’s green initiatives, from the recycled napkins and extensive recycling bins to the solar panels adorning the roof. Bottled water may be the current bane of eco-snobs, but in a baseball stadium, there’s no getting around those pesky plastic bottles. Once you allow people to start bringing in containers, you get a lot more liqoured up fans. I have great appreciation  for the chanting and enthusiasm of the Red Sox crowd, but there are certainly a few college-agers who could stand to take it down a notch or three. Anyway, Fenway’s greenness.

The Red Sox are the first MLB team to use solar thermal energy. There are 28 solar panels replacing 37% of the gas needed to heat the stadium’s hot water:

The team (and all teams, presumably) go through crazy amounts of paper for each game, says Red Sox PR person Marty Ray–a 35-page pack of major league statistics for each team, a 15-page “game notes” handout for the players, printouts for sports broadcasters. They’ve been printing all but the broadcaster’s notes on double-sided paper now.

 A “Green Team” of college students collects recyclable trash, so fans don’t have to leave their seats to recycle (and anywhere from 25 to 85 college kids get to watch the games for free, not a bad trade on either end).

 Katie Haas, the Red Sox green coordinator, showed off the recycle bins, too:

And the best news for Red Sox fans who are shaking in fear over the possibility that the franchise will chuck their historical, small-seated stadium for a big, shiny new one, Haas said, “The greatest form of saving the environment is preserving this ballpark.”

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