In the name of the World Series, wait until skies clear
PHILADELPHIA -- Just looked outside, and it's not snowing.
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Not yet, anyway.
It's cold enough, and wet enough, and windy enough, and dreary enough. It's bad enough out there that if your favorite team was playing football and you had tickets, you'd think long and hard about staying home and watching it on TV.
Baseball?
Forget it.
There was absolutely no way Game 5 could resume Tuesday. And now there's absolutely no reason Game 5 should resume until the conditions allow the Rays and Phillies to play actual baseball.
I don't want to hear about a window. I don't want to hear about maybe being able to get the game in. Now that we've gotten to this point, let's wait until we have a normal baseball night.
Hopefully, it'll be worth the wait.
Already, some are saying that this World Series will forever be tainted, and that all anyone will ever remember will be the rain. I'm not so sure about that.
The 1975 World Series included three straight days of rain between Game 5 and Game 6. At the time, there was talk of "waiting until Thanksgiving" if necessary, just as there was Monday.
It was going to be the World Series remembered for the rain. Yeah it was, right up until Carlton Fisk stepped to the plate and hit a home run.
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| The gates will remain closed in Philly at least another day. (Getty Images) |
Maybe we'll have a walk-off home run to end the World Series (something that has only happened twice before). Maybe we'll have a Rays win in Game 5, and then a memorable Game 6 or 7 finish at Tropicana Field.
Sure, if the Phillies don't end up winning this thing, a whole bunch of people in this area are going to be looking for someone to blame. But for those of us who are neutral, what could be better than a dramatic finish, no matter when that drama comes?
And if the Phillies do win it in dramatic fashion, do you really think they're going to consider their second World Series title forever tainted, just because there was a two- or three-day wait in between innings?
(Heck, some of these between-innings breaks already seem to take days, while they wait for all the commercials to finish).
"The champagne will still taste as good," Phillies NLCS hero Matt Stairs said. "Maybe it'll be even colder."
Sure, it'll be strange to go to the ballpark Wednesday or Thursday (or whenever), knowing we might only see 3½ innings of baseball. It'll be strange to see the Rays take the field at the beginning of the night, and it'll be strange to see that the first Phillies hitter due up is Cole Hamels (although it will actually be a pinch hitter for Hamels).
But the stands will be full, and the fans will be loud. They'll come to the park expecting to celebrate, just as they did Monday.
If the Phillies win, they will celebrate, every bit as much as they would have celebrated Monday. If anything, it'll better than it would have been Monday, because it won't be nearly as wet and nearly as cold and nearly as miserable.
It'll be memorable.
The 5½ innings that were played Monday were memorable, too, but for all the wrong reasons. We'll remember the puddles on the field. We'll remember Jimmy Rollins running around after a popup that eventually fell. We'll remember B.J. Upton sliding into second base and worrying that he would slide all the way to the left-field fence.
"It wasn't hard to slide," Upton said. "It was tougher to stop."
In retrospect, they never should have started the game Monday. We know that. We can assume that they know that.
We can't do anything about it now, and neither can they. What they can do is make sure that whenever Game 5 resumes, it resumes in weather that allows normal baseball to be played.
Wait, if we have to wait.
Hopefully, it'll be worth the wait.
