Baseball Dealt a Tough Hand by Lousy Smarch Weather

Whatever happened to Spring?

Maybe it’s me. I live in Connecticut. We’ve had one nice day so far this month, or at least a day nice enough to wear shorts and not look like you’re a dopey high school kid.

Most of the country has experienced an unseasonably cold April and, in turn, it has wreaked havoc on the Major League Baseball schedule.

Tuesday night, two more games were rained/snowed out, pushing the season’s total to 16. Twice, there’s been a scenario with three games postponed on one night.

Baseball in cold weather cities in April is always going to be a risk, especially in Colorado and Minnesota. The Twins have already had four games postponed due to weather. The Rockies and Indians three each.

Naturally, the Mets played last week in Minnesota and then Colorado. As a result, the Mets’ 10-game road in August that stops in Arizona, Los Angeles and San Diego will need to make a visit to Target Field before heading back to New York. Fun.

The question, can anything be done about this?

There’s two paths we can go down:

1. Hire Hank Scorpio to build a weather machine.

2. Live with it.

The second option is the only path baseball can take, unfortunately. It’s unfair to schedule the bulk of April games in warm-weather spots or places with domes. Attendance lags before school is out, so it’s unfair to divvy things up that way. (Granted, people aren’t going to go to Marlins home game whether you schedule them in April or August.)

A smarter solution is a little more oversight before Bud Selig signs off on the 162-game schedule, especially with interleague play every day. Somebody in the MLB home office needs to show a little common sense, when possible — or at least crack open a Old Farmer’s Almanac. It doesn’t make a heap of sense for teams to make their only trip to a city in April. (Bonus fun fact, until 2005 the MLB schedule was devised by a husband and wife duo for 24 years.)

This season Minnesota hosted Baltimore, the Mets, the Angels and Miami in April at Target Field. Those are those four clubs only trip to the Twin Cities in the six-month regular season. Making the schedule is never going to be perfect — my head spins simply thinking about how it’s done — yet this particular scheduling decision is baffling.

Somewhere a light bulb has to go off that this isn’t the best idea, even if baseball wants more divisional games down the stretch.

It’s probably a quirk. The weather is the weather. Sometimes it’s good in April, sometimes it isn’t.

And, as a friend once told me, there’s nothing worse than talking about the weather.