Salt Lake Bees pitcher Amalio Diaz smiled thinly as he gazed at the finely manicured infield of Spring Mobile Ballpark.

"It's fast," he said.

Infielder Paul McAnulty offered another perspective of the new grass-and-dirt playing surface:

"It's level."

Eventually, as the weather warms and the grass thickens, ground balls won't skip through the infield as fast. If groundskeeper Jared Olson and his assistants do their job correctly, the smooth surface will remain level and true, good news for infielders throughout the Pacific Coast League.

"Right now, depending on the way you look at it, we're starting at zero or at 10 and we want to keep it at a 10," Olson said. "I like to think we're at zero and we want to maintain that."

However the field is measured, the grounds inside the 17-year-old ballpark play as true and are as beautiful as they have ever been. Gone are the patches of poa annua, or annual meadow grass, a low-growing, tufted weedlike grass that sprouted up in the outfield.

No longer is there a "lip," or seam between the infield grass and dirt that sometimes made fielding ground balls an adventure.

"Knock on wood," said Salt Lake Bees general manager Marc Amicone, banging knuckles on his own head, "but we've already played a couple games on it that we couldn't with the old dirt."

Rain and snow were a constant at the start of the 2011 PCL season in Salt Lake City, but the field drained well.

The new dirt mix, DuraEdge Pro, which comes from Natural Sand Co., of Slippery Rock, Pa., is designed to interact, so to speak, with water. It puddles on top, then absorbs.

In fact, Olson left the protective tarp off the field following a rainy exhibition game between the University of Utah and the Bees, just to see how it would respond. A year earlier, grounds crews would have worked an entire day to put the field in playing shape.

"Jared said, 'We'll be OK. I just want to see how it responds,' " Amicone said. "By 11 the next morning, it was perfect."

Certainly, the Salt Lake owners did not want the 2011 Triple-A All-Star Game, complete with a home-run derby and concert, to be played on a second-rate field. At the conclusion of the 2010 season, the entire field was taken up.

Excavators dug down at least 3 inches and sterilized the sand to remove and kill any remaining poa seeds. The field was regraded with a laser, one that was accurate to one-half of a percent.

New sod — Olson uses natural fertilizers instead of synthetics — was brought in from Graffs Turf Farm, of Fort Morgan, Colo. It is the same bluegrass sod used at Minnesota's new Target Field, St. Louis' Busch Stadium and Denver's Coors Field. The sand, clay and silt mixture is also used at New York's new Citi Field and PNC Park in Pittsburgh.

By Oct. 31, the job was complete.

"It's a lot better," said McAnulty, who played on the old field in 2010. "It holds together really well, especially in the wet weather."

While McAnulty said players didn't consciously think about the uneven edge of the grass and infield dirt, they certainly noticed it.

"It's a little fast," he said of the new field. "But that will slow with time."

Until then, Olson uses groundskeeper tricks to help the pitchers.

"We make the dirt in front of home plate softer to absorb grounders," he said.

martyr@sltrib.com

Twitter: @Tribmarty