CHICAGO – With apologies to Jed Hoyer, Dan Kiermaier probably has been the busiest Chicago Cubs employee this offseason. While Hoyer mostly has been working in stealth mode on revamping the Cubs roster for the 2025 season, Kiermaier, the team’s head groundskeeper, has been getting Wrigley Field’s field ready for a couple of Northwestern football games.
The ballpark and field looked to be in perfect shape Friday afternoon, and Wrigleyville is ready for a massive invasion of Ohio State fans for Saturday’s noon ET kickoff. Belated thanks were in order to the Cubs for missing the postseason, allowing groundskeepers more time to get the field ready, and to Mother Nature for the mild fall weather that kept most of the ivy intact on the outfield walls for NU’s homecoming game. “We started removing the mound and some of the clay the second week of October,” Kiermaier said Friday during last-minute preparations. “And we wrapped up the project on Halloween, in terms of laying all the sod.”
About 30,000 square feet of new sod has been installed on the playing field, which once again will run from east to west – or from the right-field bleachers to the third-base box seats. Those old enough to remember when the Bears played at Wrigley Field know the field ran north and south back in the day, leading to field-goal attempts and extra points flying over the left-field bleachers and onto Waveland Avenue. Saturday’s game will be Northwestern’s fourth at Wrigley since 2010 and its third since 2021. The Wildcats have yet to win one and enter Saturday as a 28 1/2-point underdog to No. 2 Ohio State.
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