Major League Baseball needs to make some changes to its approach to rainouts.
On Wednesday night, when the heavy rain started in the bottom of the sixth inning, the Red Sox and Atlanta Braves sat around for almost three hours before resuming play. At the time of the delay, the Red Sox led by three runs.
After the interminable wait, play resumed at midnight, and not long after, the rain began falling heavily again. It got so bad after the bottom of the eighth inning the Fenway Park grounds crew began spreading Stay-Dry -- a drying agent -- around the plate, the mound and infield. This necessitated yet another delay, and prohibited reliever Matt Andriese from making his warmup tosses.
Surely, Major League Baseball has access to the most sophisticated weather projection systems and every radar system imaginable. A simple check of weather sites online revealed more rain was coming soon after the game resumed. Was it really the right call to re-start the game?
To be clear, the game was in the hands of MLB -- not the home team or even the umpiring crew.
Part of what drives these kinds of decisions -- endless waits, which frustrate fans in the ballpark, viewers at home and the potential for injuries to the players once play starts back up -- is the unbalanced schedules that teams play. Unless you're playing a division foe, any visiting team is making its only visit to a particular city that season.
Whether it's an NL team like the Braves or a team from the AL Central or West, those teams come to Boston for one series and one series only. If a series isn't completed, re-scheduling can he hell. Teams must find common off-days on the schedule, and even then, one of the teams might be concluding a series a couple of thousand miles away, forced to fly halfway across the country to make up a game postponed months earlier.
But if baseball is going to have a schedule in which half the games involve a visiting team there for just two or three days, some changes have to be made. It's not 1988 anymore, with no interleague play and every team making two separate visits to every other city in its league.
Times have changed, and MLB needs to change with it. If they're going to insist teams play an unbalanced schedule to enhance rivalries within the division, then something else is going to have to give. And it starts with a new policy toward inclement weather.
Would the Atlanta Braves have been happy if MLB didn't attempt to finish the game last night? Of course not. The Braves are locked in a tough race in the NL East and every game counts. The chance to have three more innings in which they could make up a three-run deficit was something they welcomed.
But if MLB is going to approve of seven-inning games for doubleheaders this season and last, it seems they can make similar adjustments here.
If a game is official after five innings -- and Wednesday's obviously was -- then MLB needs to introduce a maximum wait time. If a game can't safely be re-started after, say, one hour, then the game is called off and the results from prior to the stoppage are official.
It makes no sense -- none at all -- for Major League Baseball to approve of the shortening of doubleheader games to seven innings by citing the pandemic and the inherent dangers of having players spend too much time at the ballpark, putting themselves at additional risk....and then have those same players sit for hours and hours in the hope that the rain lets up.
Forget, for a moment, the paying customers, forced to take shelter in the concourse last night because of thunder and lightning in the area. Forget that MLB was asking those fans to remain in the ballpark for more than six hours to see the completion of an "official'' game.
At some point, this is about integrity of competition, the health of the players involved and something that's too often absent from decision-markers: common sense.
If games are official after five innings -- a standard that MLB has long used -- then it shouldn't be cataclysmic to throw in the towel after an hour wait. Again, some teams will be victimized. Some comebacks that might-have-been will never get the chance.
But we're talking maybe a handful of games over the course of a season. And as long as both teams have an equal number of chances (innings) to win the game before the rain intercedes, then these games will only be an extension of the concept of the seven-inning games that are played as part of competition.
Sure, there are larger issues for MLB to tackle -- the upcoming labor agreement, while trying to fix the stagnant product on the field.
Still, applying a little bit of common sense to a problem right in front of it, however, wouldn't be a bad start.