Saturday, April 07, 2007

SCHEDULING ISSUES

Something I haven't really thought about until just now. The Sox have been on the road in Kansas City and Arlington. Two warm cities. Usually this happens for us. We almost never start a season at home, and typically for the first week or two, we play in warmer places. This might be due to the division that we're in. We play Baltimore, Tampa, and Toronto (dome) a lot so it's easy for us to begin the year in a warm place.

For some reason, the schedule makers at MLB have decided that cold weather cities be the location for games. The result can be seen in the Seattle/Cleveland series, which was completely wrecked by weather problems.

The weird things about these games is that there are warm weather teams playing against cold weather teams IN cold weather cities.

Just a few examples:
Tampa Bay playing in New York against the Yankees.
Toronto playing in Detroit, instead of in the domed Rogers Centre
Atlanta playing in Philadelphia
Florida playing in Washington
The Dodgers playing in Milwaukee
Arizona playing in Colorado
Seattle in Cleveland
Baltimore in New York
Minnesota in Chicago instead of in the MetroDome

Someone needs to tell MLB that cities like Boston, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia are usually still cold in April. Furthermore, it can still be snowing in these cities in April. Maybe MLB is trying to get a step ahead of global warming, but for now, it's simply moronic that games are being played in the North when they could easily be played in the South.