Since last year, the Elizabethton Parks and Recreation Department has been facing a mystery at Joe O’Brien Field.

In the baseball field’s outfield, small bumps or clumps of dirt are popping up in the Bermuda grass that makes up the turf, and those bumps are causing problems for players who are fielding baseballs since the bumps can cause the ball to bounce off in an unpredictable direction.

“We noticed we had an issue with the outfield playing surface last year,” said Mike Mains, director of the Elizabethton Parks and Recreation. “It was brought to our attention by our high school baseball team (Elizabethton Cyclones). Of course, the facility is used ten months out of the year now, and there is play on it, and everyone does a great job taking care of the field including our staff and the high school’s.”

To figure out what is going on at the field, Mains, along with maintenance supervisor David McQueen and assistant supervisor Garrett Johnson, reached out to experts to find a reason for their predicament. To make the field more appealing and playable in the colder months, the parks and rec planted blue bermudagrass which is supposed to survive year round. Thinking that the bluegrass was the cause of the clumps, Mains had a representative from the manufacture of the grass fly in and check things out.

“We immediately thought we had a situation with overseeding of this product,” said Mains. “So we reached out to the manufacturer, and he flew in. They said they hadn’t seen anything like that before. That concerned us.

“We had other professionals in turf management come in,” added Mains. “We had people come from North Carolina and Western Tennessee to look at it, and it is the still the same thing. They could not give us a definitive answer to what it could be.”

There have been plenty of possible explanations given for the clumps.

“We have heard everything from worms to underground crawfish,” said Mains. “We have heard skunks are out here digging it up. Moles.”

Last year, to get the field playable for the summer months, the parks and rec used large rollers, which were provided by Summers-Taylor, to flatten the field and the clumps.

“The field was rolled in several different directions to get leveled back down, and the bermudagrass came on, and the field was more playable,” said Mains.

The next step in solving this mystery will be to bring in an expert with the University of Tennessee Agriculture Extension from Knoxville. The parks and rec also plan to remove the blue bermudagrass to see if that will solve the problem.