When did we start rolling tarps over baseball fields?

[haapai]

I remember grandpa watching an awful lot of baseball back in the 70s and 80s but I can't remember ever seeing a tarp being rolled out during a rain delay.  Was it just not televised, or were the available materials so heavy and bulky that nobody even tried it?

[Abby Normal]

It's been done for awhile.

from baseballparks.com

In which ballpark was a tarp first used?

Yes, we do get some interesting questions here at BASEBALLPARKS.COM.  While there is no way to know for sure, here's what two different resources have to say.  One says that the St. Louis Browns were the first pro baseball team to use small tarpaulins to protect the areas around home and the bases from rain.  Another source relates a much more colorful story:  in the 19th Century, bales of cotton would often be covered by tarps to keep them dry.  The owner of the Minor League New Orleans Pelicans spotted this practice at a loading dock in Louisiana in 1887 and decided to try it out at his ballpark.  That next spring, the Reds played an exhibition game in New Orleans and liked the idea so much that they started using a tarp to cover the infield on rainy days in Cincinnati.  When other National League teams saw how such a tarp could keep an infield in playable condition, all of the other franchises started doing the same thing.  Is this tale accurate?  Who knows!

[tskeeter]

When baseball player salaries started to really go up and contracts required payment whether the player got onto the field or not, team owners started to get concerned about the risk of injury to very expensive ball players.  Can't have players slipping and getting injured on rain soaked fields.

Well, that's part of the reason.  Other factors are, as you pointed out, better tarping materials, better groundskeeping, a desire to keep field conditions consistent throughout the game to not put one team at a disadvantage, and the discovery by the networks that fans enjoy watching the grounds crew hustle to get a field covered or uncovered.  A final factor is the current game schedule.  Back in the days when there were fewer games per season, it wasn't as big a deal to reschedule or finish a game the next day.  There was enough open time in the schedule for this to happen.  As games have been added to the season, postponed games create a major scheduling problem. So it is more critical to complete games on the day they were originally scheduled.