More complaints about the new Rogers turf

Eduardo A. Encina, an Orioles beat writer for the Baltimore Sun had a couple of tweets about the turf at Rogers this morning:

Not an excuse for sweep, but #Orioles left #Toronto thinking new Rogers Centre turf is major problem. Too spongy, slow & lots of untrue hops

— Eduardo A. Encina (@EddieInTheYard) April 24, 2015

And

In fact, there was consideration by #Orioles of not playing Tues night, especially after Paredes was hurt on bad hop. O's have contacted MLB

— Eduardo A. Encina (@EddieInTheYard) April 24, 2015

I have a feeling that this is going to be continually brought up this year, likely every time the Blue Jays win a series at home. But, no way in hell were the Orioles going to forfeit a game. That's nuts.

I can see it is going to take a little while for players to get used to the new turf. Normally, artificial turf is fast. Last year opposing teams were complaining about how hard and fast the turf was. They blamed the speed of the turf for errors. Now....it is too slow and they are blaming that for errors. The other team is always going to blame the park for losing. When (if) we get real grass, opposing teams are going to complain about that.

I half expected Showalter to tell us that the turf was the reason that Orioles pitchers missed when trying to bean Jose Bautista.

The good part is, no one is saying that it causes injuries this year. In fact Josh Donaldson, in a Ben Nicholson-Smith post,  is saying much the opposite:

"It's hard because you're used to turf being fast and really being somewhat bouncy and this is kind of the exact opposite," Donaldson says. "It's slower."

That said the softness of the playing surface didn't take much of a toll on Donaldson over the course of the 10-game stay in Toronto.

"What I think is an advantage of it is my body definitely feels better from playing this homestand than it did after three games last year [as a visitor], so I think that's a positive," he says.

I'm glad we have gotten rid of one complaint.

People are always going to complain about other team's parks. Tropicana Field has those stupid walkways in the ceiling that balls hit, and you can't see popups against the white ceiling. Yankee Stadium has the way too short right field porch. Fenway Park has a crappy infield, giving lots of bad bounces and has stupid dimensions.  O.co is, well, O.co.

I like that balls aren't bouncing over the wall for ground rule doubles, but....about the only good thing about artificial turf is that the ball moves faster, making for some exciting plays. If the ball moves slower there are fewer spectacular looking plays, which, since baseball is a spectator sport, isn't such a good thing.