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London Stadium into a world- ballpark for the Red Sox and Yankees
London Stadium has undergone several transformations since it was first opened but now it has seen its most radical change as it turned into a state-of-the-art ballpark to host its first ever baseball game. Originally built and used for the London
2012 Olympic Games the former Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, London, was first modified to become the home of West Ham United. Now, the London Stadium played host to Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees on June 29-30 as it became the first stadium in Europe to host a regular season MLB game. Despite the London Stadium technically
being a multi-purpose venue, it is primarily used for football, so the job to transform it into a ballpark fit for the biggest teams in the sport’s history was a substantial project. However, the logistics of the task was made easier due to the athletics running track surrounding the pitch, allowing more space than typically of football stadia in the UK. Companies tasked with the job were given
just over three weeks to make the radical augmentation, with the most significant aspect being the installation of a totally different playing surface. For the first time in the 2,200 game
history of the fixture between the Red Sox and Yankees they will be playing on synthetic
turf, where 141,900ft2 of artificial turf from France has been installed on top of West Ham’s grass pitch. BrightView, which carried out the
challenge to install the synthetic turf, sent in a crew of more than one hundred workers to build a baseball field in just 23 days and used an innovative method for the turf. Not only does the use of synthetic turf
prevent the waste of two full fields of sod, but now, after the two games in London are over, MLB and the MLBPA will be able to use the field somewhere else or offer it to another team or league. For the pitcher’s mound and home plate area, specific clay was imported from the US,
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