Building a triple headed hill

Over the past couple of ears EJ (team mate) and I have completely gutted and rebuilt 3 mounds. So far, they have all turned out fantastic. In fact, last year a few of us redid the second fields' mound at Neptunus, and have heard that it holds up much better than the first fields' mound. So I guess it's a good thing we rebuilt the main fields' mound this past fall after the season, I'm looking forward to seeing how our work holds up when the season starts in 2 months here.

Yesterday we started on a new project mound. A triple headed bullpen mound (3 rubbers). Rotterdam has a baseball school for 11-16 year olds, EJ is the head trainer for them and they work out at Neptunus. The board put out 40,000 Euro this winter to build a betting cage with a mound and 'Iron Mike' pitching machine. It's very nice; Top quality everything from lights to carpetting to the qulity pitching machine and so on. The mound outline in metal was hand made with the proper specifications (height, length, slope and line for distance rubber) already added. That made it a bit easier to crop and dig.

The mound had previously been partially filled with just sand, and EJ had already put a line of clay in the landing spot weeks back. It is our base, but sand does not make a good mound. Our job yesterday was to put the 3 rubbers in surrounded by about 300 clay bricks to create a solid top . We had strings going everywhere and make sure the rubbers were high enough, in the right spots, and that we had bricks far enough behind, in front and to the sides.

We finshed that off finally after about 5 hours of work yesterday. Today I'm heading back out there to add some more clay to the landing spot, and cover the whole mound under about an inch of dirt. It will be sharp.

Some pictures from yesterday, the first 7 are after a couple hours of work, and the last 4 were taken at the end of the day.

Clay Bricks, that's the first of 3 loads...

Unicorn painted onto the turf. The baseball school is Rotterdam Unicorns.

From behind

Our clubhouse door in the background. They put this cage underneath our bleachers out of the weather

Blue box is where Iron Mike lives,

Yes, they do have John Deer in Holland.

Yes, the rubbers are very close, the middle one is only for live batting practice, the other 2 are for bullpens




Back at it today!