Murray Cook remembers lounging in his yard as a kid at his family’s home across from the Salem Civic Center, watching the jets pass overhead.
“Someday,” he mused back then, “I’m going to fly in one of those.”
He laughs now as he recalls those daydreams.
“I never thought it’d be this much,” he said.
Now Major League Baseball’s official field and ballpark consultant, Cook has traveled to roughly 60 foreign countries, preparing facilities and surfaces for play. The 55-year-old Roanoke Valley resident’s expertise with sod, clay and design has helped him meet U.S. Presidents and other world leaders. It has put him in the front row at some of baseball’s most distinctive international and domestic events.
Last Sunday night, Cook sat in the Atlanta Braves’ dugout at Fort Bragg as the Miami Marlins defeated Atlanta 5-2 in the first regular-season game ever played on an active military installation. Cook had overseen the construction of Fort Bragg Stadium, as crews transformed a dormant golf course into a 12,500-seat gem suitable for a nationally televised event.
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“Murray Cook is fantastic,” Tony Clark, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, told reporters at Fort Bragg. “To see the progress over the past four months, with a field that looks like it’s been here forever... it’s truly a testament to the work that goes on behind the scenes by guys like Murray and his staff.”
Seated at the podium nearby, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred nodded his head in agreement. He’s seen Cook ace two major projects in the past four months, starting with the exhibition between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team in Havana on March 22. That came less than three weeks after they’d broken ground on Fort Bragg Stadium.
Cook was in Roanoke County this past week for a little relaxation — “I always look forward to coming home and seeing my mountains,” he said — but his work is hardly finished. He’s off to Nicaragua this week to help prepare fields for 2017 World Baseball Classic qualifiers. In early August, he’ll jet to South Korea. He’ll be in Australia at the end of next month.
“The beat goes on,” said Cook, estimating that he spends about 150 days per year traveling. “Not quite as hectic, but definitely pretty steady. Not a lot of rest for the weary.”
Cook has been a ballpark fixture since he was a child chasing foul balls at Salem Pirates games at Salem Municipal Stadium, which is now Kiwanis Field. He started working on the field there at age 13 in 1974 and gradually ascended the groundskeeping ladder.
In 1989, MLB commissioned him to travel with two Mets and Red Sox affiliates to the former Soviet Union, where he helped prepare fields for three weeks of exhibition games. His relationship with MLB blossomed from there.
MLB has counted on him to prepare fields at three Olympic venues: Sydney (2000), Athens (’04) and Beijing (’08). Cook got stadiums up to MLB standards in Latin American before the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006. In 2014, he oversaw a three-week transformation of a cricket pitch in Australia into a baseball diamond where the Dodgers and Diamondbacks opened the season.
His expertise includes basic field construction — how to build a mound, how to maintain the field, the different types of equipment to use. But it’s expanded to ballparks — what padding to use, the size of the dugouts, the batter’s eye, the bullpen locations. Safety is the top priority for both MLB and the players union.
Cook’s challenges vary based on the location of the event.
“Working in Cuba, where the resources are extremely limited, we’re literally looking for sod to sod the infield and they don’t have sod,” said Cook, the president of a company called BrightView Sports Turf. “We have two-inch square pieces of grass we’re plugging the field with.
“Think of the Olympics in Beijing. You go there, and here’s a country that just doesn’t play baseball. So I have 140 volunteers to train on how to, one, build a field, and two, how to maintain it. We started with, ‘OK, this is first base. And this is second base. And this is home plate.’ And they didn’t have words for what that was. It wasn’t even in their vocabulary.
“With the right relationships and diplomacy, we get through it.”
The Fort Bragg project was unique. Cook trained a grounds crew composed entirely of active service members — not surprisingly, he found them to be particularly attentive compared with some he’s supervised — and battled constant rain throughout the tight construction window.
The tension was real.
“Oh, sure,” Cook said. “It’s just like any other job, it has a pressure point on it. The game’s going to happen. The date’s going to come. You’ve just got to be ready for it.”
As usual with Cook-led projects, they were. The field shimmered in front of ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” cameras. Forecast rain stayed away. Service members were recognized throughout the night in an event that was every bit as special as it was intended to be.
“I was honored to be a part of it,” Cook said. “I’m a perfectionist, and I can always find something I’d rather do differently here or differently there. But I think overall, we met expectations of the players union, MLB, and, more importantly, the service members who were there at the park. We’re pleased with how that turned out.”
The same could be said of his career. It’s been one he never dreamed of, even those days as a kid when he was staring at the clouds.