Watched a little of the press conference with Bud Selig last night after the suspension of Game 5 and didn’t Bud Selig look a little strange? Granted, this is a man who typically has some unusual mannerisms and tics, but the way he spoke … like …. this … and fidgeted made it seem like he was talking about some great tragedy, not bad weather.
Then again, to some fans, it might have felt like a tragedy. Especially if the Phillies go on to lose the Series somehow.
Already today there has been a lot of debate over whether Selig handled the situation correctly. I submit that he did, that there was little else he could have done differently. Some would want him to have never allowed the game to be started, but considering the forecast in Philly yesterday afternoon – it called for 1/10 of an inch of rain from 7 p.m. to 12 a.m. – that would have been incredibly over-reactive. Weather changes sometimes; this time it did.
There’s also the school of thought that Selig should have just let the game continue. That bad conditions are a natural occurrence when you play games in late October (a discussion which, I believe, we’ve already had on this blog, and a phenomenon I’m in favor of avoiding by shortening the regular season). If you start the game, the logic goes, why not just finish it?
This is a fair point and since the conditions were the same for both teams, it’s not altogether untenable. But there is also the so-called “integrity of the game” and it does seem somewhat incongruous to play six months of games a certain way and then have the championship decided under such different conditions. If it’s at all possible, that scenario should be avoided.
So that’s what Selig did. He was NEVER going to allow the World Series to end on a rain-shortened game (which I’d like to think everyone can agree is a reasonable thing to do), so even if one team was winning, he would have done basically the same thing he did last night with it tied at 2: Stop the game right where it is, and pick it up at the next night when the weather is decent.
Here’s hoping that’s tonight. But even if it’s Thanksgiving, as Selig joked at one point, it would still be the fair thing to do. For a commish who has presided over a steroid scandal, a strike and a tied All-Star Game, this is one one night where Selig got it right.
CARP SAYS:
Selig didn’t get it right. He got lucky. He got lucky that the Rays tied the game. Otherwise the game would have ended and the Series would have ended with a rain-shortened game. A rain-shortened game that never should have begun.
I don’t know about that forecast for 1/10th of an inch of rain. The forecasts I was looking at all day said rain beginning in the evening and getting worse and worse all night and into Wednesday. Maybe 1/10th of an inch per hour. The Weather Channel’s radar map could not have been greener, with a blob of bad weather the size of Texas floating over the Philly area all night long. The chance of rain predicted started at 70 percent in the early evening and went quickly up to 100 percent and stayed there the rest of the night according to the forecast.
Of course there’s no way of going back and using the argument that MLB shouldn’t be allowing games between two Eastern teams, played in the Eastern time zone, to begin closer to 9 p.m. than 8 p.m, not to mention 7 p.m. MLB sold out to television long, long ago.
But, with that forecast, with what was at stake—and with fans playing a minimum of $400-plus per seat, and in many cases a lot more than that—Game 5 should have never begun. What if it had been called after 4 innings? Then they would have had to start over, and have burned their starting pitchers, their aces, for a game that didn’t count.
But far, far worse would have been the debacle of having the Phillies celebrate winning the World Series in a rain-shortened, 5-inning game … celebrating it in the clubhouse at, oh, 1 a.m. after a fruitless, long delay … and having the fans in the concourses at the stadium notified by the P.A. announcer that the Phillies had just won the World Series; or the fans notified of the championship via the radios in their cars, soaking wet, with the heat on full-blast, trying to get warm and dry on the ride home.
So you call off Game 5. The forecast is bad for today, too? Well, duh. So you play it tomorrow. It’s particularly no big deal to delay Game 5 a couple of days if the Phillies win that game, and if Tampa wins it, so Games 6 and 7 have to be pushed back, too. So what? Is Fox really calling the shots so strongly that MLB can’t move any of the games?
What a disgrace. Selig didn’t get it right. He got it wrong. He always gets it wrong. This would have been the biggest disaster of his disastrous money-hungry, bottom-line “commmissionership” if Tampa had not scored that last run. There has never been a World Series ended in a shortened game, and he would have presided over the first.
If B.J. Upton had slipped and fallen in the mud on his way home, would Selig have gotten it right then? He got it wrong. And he got very, very lucky.
