Selig Creates Another Big Game Debacle

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↵While the world at large seems to be reveling in the historic aspect of last night’s World Series rainout, Philadelphians are left to angrily consider the consequences of baseball’s bumbling decision to allow one of the biggest games of the year to continue in weather that surely would have halted any contest being played in August.↵↵In this acid column in the Philadelphia Inquirer today, Philly writer Phil Sheridan ascribes the situation to MLB’s marriage with Fox and it’s dependence on prime-time ratings, ironic when one considers just how abysmal those ratings have been for this Series.↵

↵↵In true Philly style, Sheridan goes for the knockout when he writes:↵

↵↵⇥Major League Baseball should be ashamed for allowing its most important game of the year to deteriorate into an embarrassing mess because of slavish obedience to its pimp, the Fox Television Network. Simply put, Game 5 is hopelessly tainted by what transpired between the time the game should have been called and the middle of the sixth inning, when it was finally suspended. ↵↵

Sheridan goes on to ask why exactly, if the league were so concerned with getting this game in yesterday because of the weather forecast, the game couldn’t have been played in the afternoon. It’s a good question. The weather was fine in Philly during the day yesterday, and everyone knew it was going to be dicey last night. Obviously scheduling the game for the daytime would have involved some detailed forethought and been quite an inconvenience for everyone involved, but would it have been more of an inconvenience than the situation as it stands? ↵↵It does seem like the only reason the game couldn’t have been played during the day yesterday is television, which leads us to last night’s ugly national TV spectacle of MLB’s incompetence. How, HOW, could they allow the game to go on in those conditions? If, as he now asserts, Bud Selig was so certain that he wouldn’t allow the World Series to end on a game called because of weather, then why did they wait to stop it after Tampa had scored the tying run, at least a full inning, and more like two innings, past when any reasonable person would have gotten the players off the field? ↵

↵↵The Phils are now without the services of their best pitcher. A game they were winning is now tied under dubious circumstances to say the least. All I can hope is that, like Game 3 where an umpiring blunder led to the Rays tying the game only to have Philly come back and win it in the end, the Phils win this thing whenever Game 5 resumes and we can forget the whole mess. For my sake as a Phillies fan I hope for that, but also for the sake of Bud Selig and the MLB front office. Because as a local who knows just how angry, how anxious, how utterly desperate Philly fans are right now, lemme tell you something: On this particular issue, hell will hath no savage fury like Philly scorned.↵

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