SLIPPERY ROCK, Pa. _ It was 10 years ago, on a famously miserable October night in Philadelphia, that this oddly named borough in an opposite corner of Pennsylvania began to acquire another strange appellation: the Capital of Baseball Dirt.
During Game 5 of the 2008 World Series, a cold rain fell relentlessly on Citizens Bank Park. Just before play was suspended, with the Phillies leading, 2-1, Tampa's B.J. Upton took off for second base, bursting through raindrops that glistened like fireflies in the ballpark's artificial light.
Each footfall raised a plume of water on the puddle-pocked infield, yet the Rays outfielder moved swiftly and freely, easily beating catcher Carlos Ruiz' throw.
Though Upton's dash, in conditions one sportswriter described as "dicey at best, horrible at worst," seemed a foolish risk, he hadn't lost his grip. More importantly, neither had the infield.
"The ground stayed stable," Mike Boekholder, the Phillies head groundskeeper, recalled recently. "Despite all that surface water, it stayed stable. I talked to Upton later, and he was amazed. He said, 'It was the weirdest thing. You had all this water on the top, but I never lost traction.' "
Many others in baseball noticed, too. They wanted to know about the makeup of that infield, how it could withstand so much rain, why it remained playable. The secret, they would learn with some bemusement, was a dry rock found near Slippery Rock, Pa.
It was, more precisely, a hard and powerfully absorbent clay mined, refined and sold by a small company on the outskirts of this college town 50 miles north of Pittsburgh.
