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COPPELL – Cowboy Field gives the Coppell baseball team a nice home-field advantage. But the field also offers an advantage for visitors.

"They know that our field is going to be great," Coppell coach Don English said, "and especially the pitching mound. Our bullpen mounds are better than the field mounds at other places."

They should be. Because the guy preparing them for the game has spent years getting mounds ready for Rangers pitchers.

That guy is Coppell assistant coach Pat "Hondo" Hernandez, who spends weekends and the summer working with the field crew at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. For 21 years he has worked with the field crew and the tarp crew and prepared the mound for games.

So it's no surprise to hear how Coppell pitcher Erik Nieder describes the mound at Cowboys Field.

"The mound's perfect," he said. "We were in Austin last week, and there was a mound with a huge hole in it. We're always happy to come back here."

MIKE STONE / Special to DMN

Coppell assistant baseball coach Pat Hernandez (right) has spent 21 years working with the Texas Rangers' ground crew.

Preparing a mound means raking the dirt and packing clay into low spots on the mound where the pitcher's foot lands. But there's more to it than that.

"A lot of people are under the conception that you throw dirt in a hole and it's fixed," Hernandez said. "But there's an art to it."

And the mound isn't prepared the same for every pitcher. No pitcher wants to step into a hole when he pitches, but some like the mound soft and some like it firm. Or in the case of Nolan Ryan, rock hard.

"You were definitely made aware of the day he was pitching," Hernandez said. "You needed to make sure the mound was hard for him so he didn't pull something."

Kenny Rogers was a "soft lander," Hernandez said, so the mound didn't need much repair work after he pitched. But right-hander Roger Pavlik, a Ranger in the '90s, could mess up a mound because he landed off the slope. His unorthodox delivery finished with his left foot landing toward the third-base dugout, not home plate.

Hernandez, 50, calls his work with the Rangers a great summer job. It also gives him some stories to tell.

Such as the time when, during a bench-clearing fight, pitchers in the visiting bullpen wanted to take on the grounds crew. There's also the famous injury to Ruben Mateo, who broke his right femur when lunging at first base trying to beat a throw.

"I was in the left-field corner, and you could hear it from all the way over there," Hernandez said. "Now I always tell the kids to run through the base and not lunge at the bag."

That story gives Hernandez a chance to teach, which he has been doing for 24 years. He's spent the last 10 seasons at Coppell, where he's also the top assistant to basketball coach Brad Chasteen.

Hernandez doesn't like to brag about his work with the Rangers. You kind of have to drag the stories out of him.

But Hernandez will tell you how lucky he feels to be part of the Rangers crew. Out on the field before each game, he's watched batting practice up close and seen players such as Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez and Ruben Sierra blossom into stars.

Hernandez remembers that Jim Anglea, the Rangers' former head groundskeeper, told him years ago that it was a privilege to walk on a big league field.

"To me, that's what it is," Hernandez said. "I've had that privilege for 21 years."