One of a summer series about the Rockies during their 25th anniversary season. Today: the grounds crew.

On this bright and shiny Thursday morning, Mark Razum is a bit bleary-eyed and in dire need of strong coffee.

Two nights before, rain and hail had pummeled Coors Field, forcing an 80-minute delay for a Mets-Rockies game that made for a 4-hour, 26-minute marathon. Then, because of a 3-hour, 25-minute game the next night, Razum didn’t leave Coors Field until well after midnight.

On top of all of that, the Rockies Foundation held two youth baseball clinics at the ballpark during the week, creating extra duties for the grounds crew.

Now, at 7:30 a.m. sharp, “Raz” was back at work, strolling the warning track of Coors’ emerald-green outfield. At 2.66 acres, it’s the largest outfield in the majors, and while it causes considerable consternation for pitchers and outfielders, the sea of seemingly perfect grass is beautiful to behold.

On this day the Rockies are hosting the Mets, with a first pitch at 1:10 p.m., so there is a lot to do over the next five hours. Plus, there’s plenty stressing Raz’s mind. In another week, the Eagles and Jimmy Buffet will be holding a concert at Coors Field, putting more stress on this parcel of baseball paradise.

“That’s a whole, unique, different animal,” he said with a laugh. “All of those roadies and rock-n’-rollers? They come in and party and get after it.”

No one could blame “Raz” for being grumpy as the morning sun casts long shadows across the outfield. Yet he’s remarkably chipper. Even after 40 years as a groundskeeper, the 57-year-old never tires of going to his office.

“Sure, I knit-pick about this and that, and I’m kind of a perfectionist,” Razum said. “But every day I still get a bit of that same feeling about a baseball park.

“I grew up in Cleveland and I still remember my first game when I was a kid. My dad took me to an Indians game. We walked down the street and there was that big old stadium — Cleveland Municipal. And when we went through the turnstile and onto the concourse and saw that incredible green field and it was like, ‘Whoa!’ I mean, I still get that feeling. So now, even when I’m tired, I know this is a special place.”

Raz has been the head groundskeeper at Coors Field since October 1994, seven months before the ballpark hosted its first game. Prior to joining the Rockies, he was the chief caretaker for the A’s for six seasons at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. From 1992-94, the players voted Raz’s playing surface as the best in the American League. He began his career at age 17, at Cleveland Municipal, under the tutelage of Marshall Bossard, an Indians groundskeeper for nearly 50 years.

Search for perfection

Razum’s day begins in his office just beyond the left-field foul pole. Outside his office door hangs a sign that reads: “Coors Field, 5,176 Feet.”

“That’s the actual altitude of our field,” he said. “The fifty-two-eighty? The mile high? That’s the purple row high up in the stands.”

Raz’s office is packed with memorabilia, including a base signed by Rockies icon Todd Helton from his final game at Coors in 2013.

“Raz, thanks for the hard work over the years,” — Todd Helton, No. 17.

The first thing Razum does each morning is check his computer for the day’s weather. There is a mini-weather station at the ballpark that provides a pinpoint forecast. This Thursday promises to be hot and dry, meaning that Raz and his crew must do some extra watering of the infield before first pitch.

“Colorado’s very arid, and when it gets hot, if you don’t get moisture into the infield, that sun will bake it hard, and we don’t want that,” he explained. “Players want to be able to get their spikes in the dirt, move to the ball and get true hops. That’s really important.”

Counting Razum, the Rockies employ four full-time groundskeepers — Jon Larson, Doug Zabinski and Adam Steward — plus eight seasonal workers, some of whom would like to make a career out of taking care of a ballpark. As Raz begins to make his rounds, Steward pilots a riding lawnmower, cutting the grass to exactly seven-eighths of a inch. Rollers on the bottom of the mower bend the blades of grass, creating the lines and checkerboard pattern in the the outfield.

Other workers are vacuuming the bullpens and the warning track, sucking up peanut shells and other debris from the game the night before.

While Steward rides his mower, Larson cuts the infield grass with a smaller push-mower. It’s an exacting job, demanding concentration to get the pattern just right. For Larson, who grew up in Tucson, Ariz. and worked maintaining golf courses before moving on to baseball parks, mowing the infield grass is the best part of his day.

“I block out everything else around me and just kind of get in the zone, and then I just go,” he said. “It’s just me and the infield, so I’m just chilling and relaxing. It’s my yoga.”

The Rockies keep their infield grass at 1 ¼ inches, a length that seems to please everyone, from Gold Glove third baseman Nolan Arenado to manager Bud Black. The height of the infield grass used to be a matter of great debate, with Razum often caught in the middle.

In 1995, the Rockies’ first season in LoDo, general manager Bob Gebhard was trying to find ways to tame the offensive outbursts at Coors. He instructed Razum to grow the infield grass 2 ½ inches high.

“The team was out on the road and Geb walked the infield with me and he said, ‘Raz, this is perfect!’ ” Razum recalled. “So then team comes back home and in the first inning, with a man on first, a batter hits the ball to Walt Weiss at short. Walt had to come charging in on the ball and barely turned the double play because the ball had slowed down so much.

“So after the inning, (manager) Don Baylor signals me over and he says, ‘Raz, we can’t have that.’ We worked it all out, but it took us years to get it right.”

Just as the infield grass gets special care and attention, so does the area around home plate,which is made of clay. Before each game, Larson patches the holes in the clay created by batters and catcher digging in with their spikes. After the holes are patched with fresh clay, Larson tamps it down to “get the air out of it,” and create as smooth a surface as possible.

“You have to have that,” Rockies catcher Tom Murphy said. “It’s got to be true around the plate so that the ball bounces as it should. You look for consistency. They do a great job of that here.”

If the area around the plate was not true, pitchers would be unable to bury curves and sliders in the dirt, fearing that a bad hop would send the ball careening to the backstop.

Bad hop nightmare

Fear of a bad hop is Raz’s worst nightmare. It’s why his crew spends so much time watering, dragging and raking the infield. Twice during the game, after the third and sixth inning, the infield is dragged and a sand-like mixture called “conditioner” is spread across the basepaths.

“This section of real estate is what I keep my focus and attention on,” Razum said. “With all of the hundreds of footprints you get out here, it gets chopped up. There’s a lot of baserunning at this place, compared to other ballparks. That’s a lot of impact on the infield. So we’re constantly doing what we can to make it better.”

Despite the long games and all the hard-hit balls at Coors, the infield and outfield almost always play true, much to Razum’s pride — and relief.

“A bad hop is one of the things that keeps me up at night,” Raz said with a laugh, but only half kidding. “We want the ball to stay true and stay down. When we were in the playoff run toward the (2007) World Series, I would watch every groundball and I’d say, ‘Please stay down, please stay down.’

“The last thing I want is a headline in The Denver Post saying, ‘Rockies lose playoff game on a bad hop.’ ”

When Razum needs a few moments of serenity, he heads to the “forest” behind the center-field wall and near the visitor’s bullpen. Casual Rockies fans might know that this area is where seven fountains shoot water 40 feet into the air when the home team hits a home run, and during the seventh-inning stretch. But the little park within a ballpark is a slice of the Rocky Mountains, beautifully maintained by Zabinski.

Beneath the green batter’s eye — covered by a vine called Virginia creeper — live pine trees and native grasses. Thirty-two hundred gallons of recycled water per minute flow over 10-12 ton boulders, creating three waterfalls and a large pond that collects its share of baseballs. The natural area features seven different kinds of Colorado trees, as well as Navajo ruby sandstone and granite marble boulders. When Coors Field first opened, the area was a sod farm, but Gebhard was instrumental in turning it into a quiet piece of paradise in 1996.

“This is my favorite spot, especially early in the morning,” Raz said. “It’s so still and quiet. Just outside the walls, traffic is getting jammed up and people are rushing to work. But I’m already here, taking all of this in. You know, sometimes you get so locked into your work, you forget what a great place this is.

“But all I have to do is get out here and then look back at that field. I take it all in. Yeah, I have a pretty cool job.”

Facts and figures on the playing surface of Coors Field

Infield

* Infield grass (Kentucky bluegrass blend) is cut daily to 1 ¼ inches

* The pitcher’s rubber on the mound is set so that its front edge is exactly 60 feet, 6 inches from the rear point of home plate and is elevated 10 inches above the rest of the playing field.

* Starting 6 inches in front of the rubber, or 60 feet from home plate, the mound slopes downward at a rate of 1 inch per foot over a span of at least 6 feet.

* Infield dirt is a clay-loam type surface composed of 25 percent clay, 15 percent silt and 60 percent sand.

* Infield is topped with a sand-like dressing to help trap moisture in.

Outfield

* Kentucky bluegrass blend

* Cut daily to ⅞ of an inch

* Grown on 10 inches of sand

* Below the sand is 4 inches of pea gravel and drains

* Designed for quick, efficient drainage

* Outfield is 2.66 acres, the largest in the majors