Secret for Charlotte Knights’ pristine field? Start with the NC native in charge of it
It’s minutes before the Charlotte Knights’ 7:04 p.m. start of the 2025 season — the 50th for the franchise based in the 704 — and it feels like you imagine it would.
The Friday sun is beaming. The Truist Field crowd is buzzing. Knights support staffers are glued to their walkie-talkies, waiting for their cues, smiling through first-game jitters. The Truist Bank representative tasked with throwing the season’s ceremonial first pitch is nervously smiling with his wife as their kids wave purple rally towels for no real reason other than directionless excitement and joy.
But look along the first baseline, and you’ll find one of the Knights’ most valuable team members. He’s not wearing a uniform, nor does he seem impacted at all by the pregame buzz. He’s stoic, focused, sharp, staring down every square-inch of field through a pair of sunglasses, making sure everything is as pristine as possible — as pristine as it’s consistently been since he arrived in 2016.
“Groundskeeper of the year three years in a row,” Dan Rajkowski said two days before the Knights’ home-opener, speaking specifically about the stoic man.
The Knights’ chief operating officer then smiled.
“He probably wouldn’t say that about himself, but I will. And he should get it every year.”
He’s right: Matt Parrott wouldn’t say that about himself.
But his work speaks volumes.
Parrott is the Knights’ director of field operations, as big a part of opening night as anyone else with the White Sox’s Triple-A affiliate. He’s been tending to the team’s peerless grass and infield dirt for nine years. And he’s racked up some credentials along the way. The Boone, North Carolina, native has been named the International League’s Sports Turf Manager of the Year four times in his tenure: in 2017, 2018, 2019 — and also in 2022.
He manages the field on one of the “nicest fields in all of baseball.” That quoted description is Rajkowski’s, but the sentiment is everyone’s. It’s a haven carved out of the bustle of uptown Charlotte, encased by a forest of skyscrapers that grow thicker by the year.
It’s something Parrott doesn’t take for granted, he said.
“When you’ve been doing any job for as long as I have, there’s a part of you who tends to look at it as, ‘This is a job,’” said Parrott, who if it weren’t for the COVID year would be working his 25th season in pro baseball.
“I mean, I obviously got into it, like a lot of people do, because it was a chance to stay in baseball. But at some point along the way, it did become a job. But I do try to remind myself where I am.”
Where he’s always wanted to be.
A dream that started in his backyard
Before he was employed by a baseball team — before his baseball-playing dreams were squashed, even — Parrott’s future vocation availed itself. He tried to build his own field of dreams.
Parrott started doing his own landscaping when he was an early teen, he said. Eighth grade or freshman year of high school. He had a few projects: carve out an MLB-regulation-sized home plate circle. He had a pitcher’s mound to match. He also cut out a bunker, planted some rye grass next to it and mowed the grass real low to make a putting green.
“It was not a successful endeavor,” he said with a laugh.
But wasn’t it?
His CV says otherwise.
Parrott spent his summers at his hometown university at Appalachian State working for Watauga County Parks and Recreation. His first internship after graduating with a business degree was working for the Wilmington Waves in 2001. He then got his first job in 2002 for an independent ball club in Newark, New Jersey, before finding a home with the Double-A Chesapeake Baysox in Bowie, Maryland, where he stayed for 14 years before coming to the Knights in 2016.
A younger version of himself would call his attempts at building a mound a “successful endeavor,” too.
“My mom’s side of the family was from the triangle, like the Wake Forest area,” he said. “So I grew up going to the old Durham Athletic Park, and I can remember as a kid, very young, elementary school for sure, sitting in the bleachers at the old Durham Athletic Park and watching the grounds crew and telling my Dad, ‘Hey, someday I’m going to work for the Durham Bulls.’”
He did, for one summer in graduate school at N.C. State.
And hasn’t strayed much since.
100-hour work weeks
Ask Parrott for a quick rundown of a typical day when the Knights are in town — say, a 7:04 p.m. start time — and he’ll shed a rehearsed line:
“I generally tell people that a good day for us is if I get home on the same day I went to work.”
His long day begins early, in time to see his daughters, Reese and Ryann, before they head off to school and his wife, Christy, before she heads off to work. Parrott arrives at Truist Park around 9 a.m., where shortly after he’ll start mowing. (“I do all the mowing,” he said. “The reason why I do it all when the team’s in town because it’s the only opportunity I have during the day to see every square inch of grass on the field.”) By 10 a.m., the day crew team comes out to check wall pads and nets and batting practice screens.
The field is all done by 1 p.m., and the ball players take the field as early as 2:30 p.m. for batting practice and defensive work. Then there’s a small break to tidy things up before the visiting team does the same. All that’s wrapped up around 6 p.m. — when the “night crew” arrives — which gives the guys about an hour before the field needs to be pristine.
He’s not out there during the game, dragging the rakes in the third inning and sixth inning, or replacing the bases in the middle of the fifth. He oversees it, though.
Then, once the game’s over — generally around 10:30 p.m. on a good night — the crew does all the repairs the night of, so they’re prepared to just do some final touch-ups before the next day’s game.
Add that all up, and that can be 100-hour work weeks when the team is in Charlotte. And even when they’re not — there’s still plenty of equipment/field maintenance work to do.
He and Nick Verzal, Parrott’s right-hand man, manage a crew of 25-30 grounds crew members.
“This is my fourth season here,” Verzal said. “We’re a good pair because he’s really smart with the grass, and I know pretty well with the clay. So it’s a good tandem. But I’ve learned a lot behind the soil science of everything working with him.”
‘You have to enjoy it while you’re here’
An away series means a more relaxed week. And yes, the offseason isn’t as time-demanding — though replacing an infield and outfield every offseason after the Truist Field’s “Light The Knight” winter festival isn’t an easy task.
Still, it’s not hard to see that Parrott lives for the home games. That wasn’t hard on Friday, anyway: Opening night, hours before MLB prospect Kyle Teel’s big night and an eventual 9-1 Knights win — in the excitement of the pregame, when the sun sets over the third-baseline and Parrott peacefully but dutifully scans the field.
“There are 30 major league baseball teams,” Parrott said. “There are now 120 minor league baseball teams that are affiliated with MLB. And so, yes, there are support staff that’s involved in all of that. But at the end of the day, man, I’m like 1 of 150 people in the country that gets to do what I do at the level that I do it.
“There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that. But you can’t get wrapped up in it. You have to enjoy it while you’re here.”
Where he’s always wanted to be.
This story was originally published March 31, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
