Featured Story /// Zac Baladenski, State Tech
From Paving Highways TO Perfecting the PITCHER'S Mound
Truth be told, Zac Baladenski preferred football. But coming out of little Paris R-2 High School, in Paris, Missouri, Zac was ready to sign as a baseball player at Central Methodist University in Fayette.
Story By: Scot
Thompson
He had one year as a high school pitcher under his belt. “I had a live arm and not a used-up arm,” Zac recalls with a chuckle. “The coaches liked it since I was a ‘fresh’ arm.” But in the end, Zac decided to forego both college and the pitch- construction and highway paving work around the country. When that grind grew tiresome, he asked his late younger brother, Mac, what he had wanted to do after he’d graduated from high school. Mac, who died in a car accident in October, answered that he wanted to be a professional landscaper.
Based on little brother’s aspirations, Zac went online to research landscape programs and found State Technical College’s close-to- home program in Linn.
He applied and was accepted into the Commercial Turf and Grounds Management program in 2017 without ever having stepped foot on campus. of experiences and a wide net of professional contacts, both of which would play a key role in his career development. “Whatever your interest is, and if you express that, they’re more than willing to give you the resources you need,” Zac, 28, says of his time at State Tech.
In Zac’s case, that meant internships with University of Missouri Ath-
letics, The Yellowstone Club, a private ski and golf community in Big Sky, Montana, and with baseball’s Boston Red Sox, who play at historic Fenway Park, Major League Baseball’s oldest stadium, and the home of the Red Sox since 1912, a distinction not lost on the wide-eyed Zac when he showed up in Beantown in the preseason winter chill of 2018. “It’s pretty incredible, hard to believe you’re in the same spot
week before the Titanic sank,” he still marvels. Zac landed the internship with the Bosox because a State Tech intern from the previous season had so impressed the organization that they
38 /// March 2025
And by great happenstance, Zac arrived in Boston in
February 2018, on the cusp of what would be a magi- cal time at Fenway Park, a season that would bring the team’s ninth World Series title.
And that’s something Zac claims he foresaw, and an-
crew, when the newcomer from mid-Missouri asked to paint the on- and the World Series sign, because when I got there I said they’re going to go to the World Series. I knew they were going to, I felt it,” Zac says of his preseason premonition. He was not only given the green light to paint those signs, but he also quickly adopted Fenway Park’s pitcher’s mound as his personal project. “That’s where all the action happens,” Zac says of the mound, which he carefully crafted to precise Major League Baseball stan- dards for every Red Sox home game, a daily task during home- According to Zac, the groundskeeper’s responsibility is threefold:
to provide for safety, playability and aesthetics. And a big league pitcher’s mound has to serve many masters. Fans expect beauty and tradition from the stands and on televi- sion, of course, but the mandatory standards are also precise and demanding from MLB, from the umpires assigned to the game, and most especially, from the multi-millionaires who stand atop it and stake their careers on its pristine condition.
A big league pitcher’s mound is a geometry calculation made of
packed clay, with precise measurements made in statutory inches, with old-fashioned brooms and wrist action at the end. And it all has to appear as if it were never touched, pristine, to both hold
in Zac’s case, his jewel of responsibility for a historic season at Fenway.
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