My informant was my baseball coach  last year, and he used this saying at a time when our team, who was usually very good, wasn’t doing so well. We were uncharacteristically making a lot of errors, and we just couldn’t seem to get the ball to bounce our way when we were hitting. One day after practice my coach noticed that the field and batting cages had not been worked on or cleaned. He brought us all together and annoyed he said, “How about we  get our jobs done and take care of this place. Take care of your field and the field will take care of you. Let’s get some good karma going and turn this thing around.”

This is a saying that my informant likely made up himself. That was the first time I had heard the saying, however, I have recently heard several versions of it, namely, “Be good to the field and the field will be good to you.” While I don’t believe in things like karma, I can see the logic in the statement he made. By taking care of the field, dragging and watering the dirt, making sure there it is smooth and there are no holes or big rocks in it will greatly decrease the chances of a ball hitting a rock or a hole and taking a bad hop, which in turn causes errors. So it’s simple: Take care of the field, and the field will take care of you.