Don Wakamatsu’s day job is bench coach of the Rangers, but his background in farming led to an interesting solution for how to sanitize a stadium.
By James Wagner
On Wednesday morning, four days before spring training games were to begin and fans would return across Major League Baseball, a six-foot-wide drone flew throughout a 10,500-seat stadium in Surprise, Ariz., the preseason home of the Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers. The drone sprayed a cleaning solution that, according to its manufacturer, will protect surfaces from germs, including the coronavirus, for more than 30 days.
The spraying took 90 minutes with a drone named Paul.
The person behind this sanitizing operation wasn’t a health or stadium official. It was Don Wakamatsu, the Rangers’ bench coach. How did a baseball lifer — someone who has worn many different major-league teams’ uniforms as a player, coach and manager, and who won a World Series ring in 2015 with the Royals — end up directing a decidedly modern take on spring cleaning?
It started with a background in farming, an interest in technology and an idea of how to adapt aspects of both interests to the current predicament facing us all amid the pandemic. He already knew how to spray crops using drones, so the transition to sanitizing seats was not much of a stretch.
Although Wakamatsu, 58, grew up in Northern California, he often visited the 40-acre farm in Hood River, Ore. of his paternal grandparents, who had been held in internment camps for Japanese Americans in the 1940s. They grew cherries, apples and pears.
“I remember having to get up at 4 in the morning, go out there in the orchard and change the sprinkler,” he said in a phone interview. “It was just a pain. But that’s part of the sacrifice and growing up, and what you did on the farm.”
Those memories stuck with him even as his baseball career eventually took him to the Chicago White Sox, where in 1991 he appeared in 18 games, his only playing time in the major leagues. After bouncing around the minor leagues with several organizations, he became a coach. In 2009 with the Seattle Mariners, he became the first manager of Asian descent in the major leagues. The Mariners went 127-147 in his nearly two seasons at the helm.
It wasn’t until 2017, while serving as the Royals’ bench coach, that Wakamatsu turned his passion for food into a foundation, WakWay, with a mission inspired by his family’s cherry-growing waste. The nonprofit began saving fruits and vegetables and donating them to disadvantaged communities in Arizona and Texas.
But in the past few years, Wakamatsu has focused more on so-called precision agriculture and helping smaller farms survive. As a child, he said, he remembers breathing in pesticides sprayed over crops from biplanes.
With the explosion of drone technology, Wakamatsu said, it was only natural to use it in farming as a more environmentally friendly, efficient and safer way to spray crops. His foundation bought its first drone last year. It now has four, each capable of carrying two and a half gallons of liquid.
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