Stormy talk has reached the sports page.
Rain and snow have already postponed 24 games this baseball season, the most before May in 15 years. The Cardinals' game Monday at Wrigley Field was rescheduled. The terrible weather this spring (well, "spring") has put the Cards in numerous uncomfortable situations _ as well as one of their biggest fans.
See, Craig Moeller has received calls from the Brewers' manager and the Diamondbacks' general manager, asking the KSDK (Channel 5) chief meteorologist for updates on St. Louis weather patterns.
"Begrudgingly," Moeller said, "I've got to shoot them straight."
During this season, fans and journalists have been outraged by the weather, sparking suggestions such as only playing early games in warm weather cities or forcing all new stadiums to have retractable roofs or even cutting the schedule down to 142 games.
My response is simply: Calm down!
There are always going to be a few weather delays at the beginning of the season, but going to extreme measures seems more wacky than the occasional April snow.
"This is not the norm, for sure," Moeller said. "It's been a crazy pattern. They've had record blizzards and snowfalls in the upper Midwest _ and it's been one of the coldest winters on record for the Midwest. It's really been an amazing stretch. Some of these storm systems that have been coming through have been historic."
This season, because of the collective bargaining agreement, is also the first with four additional days off for teams. It's funny that those days were created for rest, but they could end up being used as days to play make-up games. It is somewhat amusing that of all seasons, 2018 was the first season that the season started earlier (March 29), in part to avoid World Series games in November. But it's not like after March this particular, peculiar spring got nicer.
"We lost 15 games over the weekend, in the middle of April _ there's no way you can fix the (Major League Baseball) schedule to where you don't play in mid-April in cold weather cities," Cardinals general manager Michael Girsch said. "It's just bad luck. Even if you said, 'Oh, let's do the first 10 games on the road in warm places or in domes,' at some point, you have to go home. And by mid-April, you're going to end up in Chicago or Cleveland or Detroit. It's just bad weather, I don't think there's anything you can do about it."
Now, there are some lessons from this spring of our discontent.
It should spur talk from the players' side and the league side about playing conditions. Perhaps there's a sharper, crisper way to call off a game _ saying that at a certain wind chill or temperature, a game must be postponed? Yes, it could make for frustrating team preparation or travel, but it also would show that the league cares about the well-being of ticket-buying fans. In St. Louis, "baseball" and "Freese" fit perfectly together, but not "baseball" and "freeze."
"When the weather is really borderline, we're stressing here, because we want everyone to be prepared for what is coming," said Moeller, who made it clear that meteorologists are simply "messengers" of forecasts, despite sometimes taking the blame for them. "When it's really cold, I feel bad for the players and the sting on the hands and everything. But I'm also thinking of my fellow St. Louisans that are dropping the money to go out there and then they have to sit in 35- to 40-degree weather."
Indeed, last Saturday it was 37 degrees at first pitch _ the previous low for a first pitch in St. Louis, according to The Associated Press, was in 1961.
And St. Louis has gotten off OK compared to some other cities. The Twins had an entire weekend series snowed out. That made for four Minnesota postponements in the season's first fortnight. And in Chicago, with the wind whipping off Lake Michigan, "We're looking at temperatures (Tuesday) probably in the lower 40s," Moeller said. "And possible mid-40s on Wednesday _ and Wednesday there's another system coming through that'll bring another low-pressure area just north of Chicago. Chilly and wet condition during the day game."
During this bizarre season, even indoor baseball has been doomed. On Monday, the Blue Jays-Royals game was postponed because of damage to Toronto's Rogers Centre _ falling ice from the CN Tower tore a hole in the roof, as ice and pieces of insulation fell onto the field.
Hopefully in Toronto, there's someone to call for a hole in your roof _ or a whole new roof.
