Sunday, three major league games were postponed for inclement weather conditions. That brought the rainout total for 2011 to 25 -- more than all of 2010, when just 21 games couldn’t be played on their scheduled date.
Baseball Wonders, Still It Wonders: Who’ll Stop The Rain?
MLB has had an unusually large number of postponed games to this point in the season. Can they do anything about it?
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The initial reaction of baseball fans and pundits was to blame Bud Selig. First, just because it’s fashionable to blame Selig for anything that’s wrong with baseball. And second, because Selig decided he didn’t want the World Series played in November any more. That meant the regular season had to begin a week earlier than it did in 2010, and Selig and the TV networks dictated one other thing: They wanted the postseason to begin on a weekend, and thus the regular season would both start and finish on a weekday.
That’s why we had the 2011 baseball season start on March 30 and 31. But this happened before, both in 2003 and 2008. So why is this year different?
Because in 2011, MLB frontloaded the schedule into midwestern and northeastern cities for the first two months, and the midwestern and northeastern weather decided to say, “Not on our watch,” and so we proceeded to have the coldest and wettest April in places like Chicago in the last fifty years.
Try as you might, you can't blame Bud Selig for that. Further, you can't blame the earlier start to the schedule, either; of the 25 postponements to date, only six of them were before April 15, a date that many claim should be the start of the baseball season. Ten rainouts happened between April 16-30 and there have been nine in the first half of May, when, presumably, weather should be improving in the northeastern quadrant of North America. The weather has given equal opportunity; 15 different teams have had games called off in their ballparks. PNC Park in Pittsburgh and Chicago's Wrigley Field are the "leaders" in this dubious category, with three each. 12 other teams have been involved; only the Angels (warm in sunny California), Blue Jays (safe in their Canadian dome) and White Sox have had no postponements -- the latter, perhaps, proof of the weather vagaries. While the Cubs have had miserable weather, the White Sox have either avoided it or played through it.
The reason this is so important is, obviously, money. Teams can't afford to have dates cancelled; it's why you see so many day/night doubleheaders now played as makeup dates. The Cubs, for example, last played a single-admission doubleheader in 2006, and that was because their August 2 postponement that year against the Diamondbacks was the day before the final game of the year between the two teams and there was no other way to make up the game.
And that brings us to the crux of the issue: not early scheduling, but the way the MLB schedule is put together in general. From 1981 through 2004, a married couple who were college professors, Henry and Holly Stephenson, used to lay the schedule out on their kitchen table. They were outbid by a computer firm for the contract in 2005, and since then teams have complained almost every year about their schedule. In 2007, the Cleveland Indians were snowed out of an entire series against the Seattle Mariners, and with the snow not melting, Tribe games against the Angels were moved to Miller Park in Milwaukee. The link explains some of the problems involved in scheduling:
The Red Sox, for instance, traditionally request an April home game on "Patriots' Day," to coincide with the Boston Marathon. The Los Angeles Dodgers want to play at home on April 15, "Jackie Robinson Day," marking the day Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. Cincinnati has traditionally wanted to open at home.
And while it would be (relatively) easy to schedule many games in April and early May in warm-weather cities and domed stadiums (think the Twins wouldn't like to have a retractable roof on Target Field?), that raises two problems: first, you can't put teams on the road for an entire month, and second, the warm-weather and dome teams also like having home games in the summer when schools are out and people have vacation time.
The real issue with scheduling is that too many non-divisional games are being scheduled for early in the season. The Cubs, for example, hosted all five of the NL West teams at Wrigley Field before May 15; the weather’s been so bad that it led to last Saturday’s game being played in howling winds and a steady light rain that finally got heavy enough that the umpires mercifully halted play after six innings. This is... well, it’s not very smart. It’s disrespectful to fans, and risks player injury. That, at least, needs to change.
There are no optimal solutions to this issue unless MLB is willing to shorten the regular season schedule to an old-fashioned 154 games (unlikely; what owner would willingly give up revenue from four home dates?), play more doubleheaders (ditto, unless you play day/night DH, which everyone hates), or realign leagues and divisions geographically, which was suggested and then rejected in 1997, largely because of concerns about splitting rivalries and the destruction of 100+ years of separate National and American League records.
So there’s really no easy answer to this; the weather is what it is, and in 2010 there was unusually warm and dry weather in the midwest and northeast. The Cubs had five postponements in 2009, none in 2010 and three so far this year; it’s more a matter of randomness than beginning the season before the calendar turns to April.
Try to remember that when it’s raining in New York or Philadelphia or Boston in October.
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