When You Are Engulfed in Mud

This is the third article I’ve written about cleat cleaners. So far as I can tell, that’s three more articles than anybody else. As a result, I have spent the past two seasons completely in the tank for cleat cleaners. I’m incapable of turning on a game without assessing the situation on the mound. What color is the cleat cleaner? Can I tell which brand it is from the shape? Most importantly, how dirty is it? It’s rare to get a shot of a pitcher using the cleat cleaner, but you can still tell whether it’s being used. The evidence is right there in front of your eyes. The cleat cleaner will be filthy. The weird rubber mat that cleans cleats with cleats of its own is now staked as firmly in my heart as it is to the backslope of the pitcher’s mound.

That brings us to Monday night (and Tuesday morning). Game 3 of the World Series was a thrilling, exasperating showcase for baseball. More importantly for our purposes, it also gave the cleat cleaner a chance to shine – or to do whatever the opposite of shining is because you’re completely covered in mud – on the game’s biggest stage.

The cleat cleaner does not normally get much time in the limelight. Pitchers most often avail themselves of it right before the start of the inning. They throw their warm-up pitches, circle around to the back of the mound, take a few calming breaths, clean their spikes, then climb up to the summit and set themselves. If the broadcast has come back from commercial in time, this routine is rarely considered worth documenting. At any given time, only one shot can make it onto your television, and at least as far as directors are concerned, there’s almost always something more interesting to show than a man cleaning his shoes. Even when we do get a shot of the pitcher cleaning his cleats, we rarely see the actual cleat cleaner. The camera usually shows the pitcher from the waist up. In fact, we got one of those shots in the very first inning on Monday night. Here’s Max Scherzer using the cleat cleaner before he faces Shohei Ohtani to start the game.

Hmm. That wasn’t very satisfying, was it? As usual, you can’t see Scherzer’s feet at all. Rather than force you to take my word for it that he was using the cleat cleaner, I’ve recreated his lower half utilizing an innovative new CGI technology known as iPhone Video of Me Wearing Jeans and Baseball Cleats in My Bedroom.

Now you get it. From that shot alone, Game 3 was already a victory for all of us cleat cleaner fanatics. We actually got to see someone using the cleat cleaner during the World Series. But the cleat cleaner was just getting started. This was an 18-inning game that featured a staggering 609 total pitches. That’s not just the highest total of the season; it’s 137 pitches more than the game with the next-most pitches (Game 5 of the ALDS between the Tigers and Mariners). And each individual pitch wreaks havoc on the mound. For an example, we need look no further than the very first pitch of the game. Here’s Tyler Glasnow getting ready before he warms up for the first inning. He absolutely tears in to the mound.

The mound is made out of clay, and before every game, the grounds crew shapes and tamps it into smooth perfection, then covers it with a layer of soil conditioner. Some pitchers like the pitching rubber to be flush with the dirt, but most want to be able to wedge their cleat into a hole next to the rubber. Glasnow belongs to the latter camp, and he’s not hesitant about dredging a trench in order to get things just how he likes them. The clay goes flying every which way, and then he spanks his foot onto the mound in order to dislodge it from his cleats. All this happened before Glasnow even started his warm-up tosses. By the time the game actually started, the picture-perfect manicured mound was nothing but a cherished memory. And with every single pitch, the cleats grab some more clay and send it flying. Here’s a closeup of the very first pitch of the game. I’ve added some arrows to help you notice individual clods of mud.

You can see a small clod go flying when Glasnow raises his front foot. More clods go flying when he pushes off with his back foot. Some fall off from above when he whips it around. Others go skittering across the mound when he lands. And this is just the tabletop. We can’t see whatever destruction he causes at the front of the mound when his front foot lands. This is just one pitch, specifically the first pitch of the game, when the mound and the cleats are at their most pristine and least likely to stick. But cleats are designed to grab hold of the earth. That’s their whole job, and like so many of us, they have trouble letting go. Once there’s clay on the cleats, the remaining clay on the mound wants to stick to it too. It builds up.

If you’ve even played a game in rainy conditions, you know that it’s really uncomfortable to have your cleats fully packed with mud. It’s not just that you can’t get as much traction. It’s also that mud and clay make your shoes really heavy. You feel stuck. If you’re a pitcher, your entire delivery depends on balance, and all of a sudden, you’re trying to perform your carefully rehearsed, repeatable delivery with your balance completely out of whack. That won’t do, so you head to the cleat cleaner and make a deposit.

The cleat cleaner is exactly like the bottom of a shoe. It’s just a flat surface full of spikes designed to grab hold of big chunks of earth with maximum efficiency. If you forgot your spikes one day, you could absolutely strap the cleat cleaner to the bottom of your sneakers. It would work just fine, and you’d certainly turn some heads. When you consider the similarity between them, you realize that the relationship between the cleat cleaner and the cleat is as one-sided as you can imagine. In that sense it’s truly a selfless tool. It’s like watching a chimpanzee grooming another chimpanzee, but instead of eating the bugs it finds, it just settles them into its own fur. One day, grounds crews will invent an even bigger cleat cleaner, but until then, we get to watch the dirt build up all game long. Here’s a GIF that shows the cleat cleaner during the first pitch of every half inning during Game 3.

It sort of looks like one of those time-lapse videos of a swarm of ants devouring a piece of fruit from a nature documentary. Scherzer did a number on the cleat cleaner in the third inning, and Mason Fluharty, who replaced Scherzer in the fifth, tracked in a bunch of mud after firing his warm-up pitches. By the 15th inning or so, you can barely even see the top. It’s just a pile of mud.

It’s not just that the cleat cleaner gets completely full. Look at the havoc inflicted over the entire area. The Dodgers logo fades into nothing. Clods of clay are absolutely everywhere. That happens all over the field. Here’s a still from the 18th inning. The low angle allows you to see that the entire home plate area and much of the grass in its vicinity is covered in crumbs of mud.

After the game, the grounds crew has to remove every one of those crumbs. The home plate area and basepaths need to be perfectly smooth, and an accretion of clay would kill all the grass. They rake, they scoop with shovels, they pick them up by hand, sometimes they vacuum. And then they have to refill all the divots, which requires a tremendous amount of tamping, also by hand. It’s hard work. The tamp is a heavy tool. You raise it, you slam all that heft down into the earth, and you do it again until the ground is flat.

But that’s after the game. For the most part, the grounds crew just has to watch as the damage to the field that they just spent all day perfecting accumulates during the game. And this was an especially long game. For comparison, here’s a split-screen between the first pitch of the game and the 609th. On the right, you can see the few crumbs that Glasnow scattered across the top of the mound while excavating and warming up, but that’s it. The field is a lush, perfect carpet.

By the last pitch of the game, it’s a war zone. The left side of the frame is pockmarked and scarred. It’s covered in shrapnel. Every one of those little dark spots you see is a clump of clay that someone’s cleats yanked straight out of the field and then deposited elsewhere. I turned the contrast way up just to illustrate just how many of these clumps get spread out across the field over the course of the game.

It’s a whole lot, especially around the mound, because pitching deliveries are violent. They have hard starts and stops that send the clay flying all over the place. But the real dark spot is around the cleat cleaner, and by the 12th inning, I had noticed that it was in shambles. It was almost completely full of mud. I was ecstatic (and not a little sleep-deprived). The cleat cleaner was doing what so many of us try and fail to do for our whole lives. It achieved its full potential. Every once in a while, the grounds crew will come out and replace the cleat cleaner when it gets completely full, especially on a rainy day.

That didn’t happen on Monday. The cleat cleaner just kept getting more and more full. By the 14th inning, you could barely see its spikes at all. The clay was just piled on top of it. It was literally being buried. Here it is in the 17th inning. If the clay weren’t so much darker in color than the soil conditioner, you might not even know it was there. It’s just a lump of earth.

This is what it looks like when a cleat cleaner dies a hero. It’s cleat cleaner Valhalla. It was all downhill from there. Pitchers kept trying to clean their cleats, but the device was so completely buried that they tended to pick up just as much dirt as they deposited. The problem was, the game was still going on, and as it was the 17th inning of the World Series, they kind of needed to be at their best. That brings us to Will Klein.

Klein was pitching the game of his life. He threw a total of 5 1/3 major league innings during the regular season and had made just one appearance during the postseason. He had never once thrown more than three innings in a single outing over his five years in professional baseball. And on Monday, he delivered four scoreless innings of one-hit ball. It was a fairytale, except that his glass slipper was completely swamped in mud. During the 18th inning, cameras caught Klein going to the overloaded cleat cleaner three times, and because he was still slipping during his pitches, each time was a bit more violent than the next.

With two outs, after falling behind Tyler Heineman, 2-1, Klein decided that going Mortal Kombat on the helpless cleat cleaner was bringing diminishing returns. He finally gave up and went back to the old methods. As organist Dieter Ruhle played the theme from The NeverEnding Story, Dodgers ball boy Branden Vandal raced out to the mount with the trusty baseball standby of a couple of taped-together tongue depressors. The right-handed Klein cleaned off his left cleat himself, then realized there was no way to clean off his right cleat with a glove on his left hand. He handed off the tool to Vandel and leaned on the ball boy’s shoulder while the latter scraped off the accumulated clay and dirt with vigor. Klein gave Vandel a tap on the shoulder to say, “That’s clean enough,” and Vandal hustled back to the dugout. The righty retook the mound and struck out Heineman to end the frame.

Anything goes in the playoffs. Klein is a perfect example, a young player being asked to perform far beyond any reasonable expectation under the most intense pressure of his entire career. As it turns out, if the game goes long enough, the same gets asked of the cleat cleaner.