inflatable slides

Baseball
Artificial turf ,also named as artificial grasses, was first used in Major League Baseball in the Houston Astrodome in 1966, replacing the grass field used when the stadium opened a year earlier. It was later installed in other new “cookie-cutter” stadiums such as Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, and Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. Early AstroTurf baseball fields used the traditional all-dirt path, but in the early 1970s, teams began using the “base cutout” layout on the diamond, with the only dirt being on the pitcher’s mound, batter’s circle, and around the bases. The biggest difference in play on AstroTurf was that the ball bounced higher on AstroTurf than on real grass.

In 2000, St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Field became the first MLB field to use a softer artificial surface, FieldTurf. All other remaining artificial turf stadiums were either converted to FieldTurf or were replaced entirely by new natural grass stadiums. With the replacement of Minneapolis’s Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome by Target Field in 2010, only two MLB stadiums are still using Artificial turf: Toronto’s Rogers Centre (which converted to a next generation AstroTurf in 2010) and Tropicana Field.

American football
In 1969, Franklin Field — the football stadium of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — switched from grass to artificial turf. Also home of the Philadelphia Eagles, it was the first National Football League stadium to use artificial turf.

In 2006, Gillette Stadium - the football stadium of the New England Patriots and the New England Revolution switched from grass to FieldTurf due to the conflict of poor weather and hosting many sporting and musical events at the stadium. It is one of 13 National Football League stadiums that have turf instead of grass fields.

Field hockey
The introduction of synthetic surfaces has significantly changed the sport of field hockey. Since being introduced in the 1970s, competitions in western countries are now mostly played on artificial surfaces. This has increased the speed of the game considerably, and changed the shape of hockey sticks to allow for different techniques, such as reverse stick trapping and hitting. Due to the cost of synthetic field installation, India and Pakistan have lost their once dominant position in international competition.

Field hockey artificial turf differs from soccer and football artificial turf in the way that it does not try to reproduce a grass ‘feel’, being made of shorter fibres similar to the ones used on Dunfermline’s field. This shorter fibre structure allows the improvement in speed brought by earlier artificial turfs to be retained. This development in the game is however problematic for many local communities who often cannot afford to build two artificial fields: one for field hockey and one for other sports. The FIH and manufacturers are driving research in order to produce new fields that will be suitable for a variety of sports.

Tags: artificial grasses, artificial surface, artificial turf

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