I suspect there will be at least one wash out. In the future, its important the the Rays play ball with MLB, pardon the pun and accept more Opening Days at the Trop. With the cooler weather at least for the first few weeks of the year, it makes little sense to play these games in Boston, NY and Baltimore. Why not make better use of ballparks like Seattle, Tampa Bay, Texas, Anaheim, Oakland and Toronto? Its bad enough that Minnesota is moving into an open air park, in what could be brutal weather until early May! I know the Grand Prix and “interest” are two possible reasons for this, but this HAS to be looked at.

Funny thing is, I remember the major brewhaha after the Seattle/Cleveland crap after they lost a whole 4 day series and had to shift at least one of the games to Seattle. Seattle had to come back on two mutually separate off days to play those games. This too is reason to have a balanced schedule that makes better use of geography, but I am preaching to the choir here.

It isn’t fair to teams to have to make emergency callups to play lunacy doubleheaders just because you want to placate your broadcast partners. I am certain the players don’t really want to play doubleheaders or perhaps worse, fly in for a makeup date just to fly out right after the game. It’s time to be better efficient with the scheduling.

tue at 2pm?

30% figure. Hoping that it doesn’t rain..

I’m not going to complain as much as normal this year…but this is definitely ridiculous.

Even the Braves @ Phils last night was stupid. The weather was great in Philly all day yesterday, but they didn’t start playing baseball until after 8pm because of stupid ESPN – and the weather the rest of the series is going to blow. They should be in Atlanta, we should be in St Pete, Otherwise, if you look at the full slate of games – MLB got it pretty good this year. Just switch those 2 series, and they’re fine.

The rest of April should just flip around as normal…it makes more sense to be in warm cities, but that means less home games for teams during the summer (when kids are out of school and attendance is generally better.) Just flip the opening games.

(and drop the Japan, Sunday night, and actually most night openers….but that’s another rant.)

for starting the season in bad weather cities. That is that most of the warm weather/domed stadiums are in smaller markets, and it benefits them to play more home games after school lets out in the summer. Teams in Boston, NY & Chicago do not need that boost.

I haven’t checked whether it is really true that the schedule is set up that way, but if it is, possibly teams in Florida might prefer the schedule as it is. This is pure speculation of course.

If there is any advantage to playing Sept/Oct games at home when you are contending for the title, the Rays do benefit by playing 18 of 30 of those games in TB., although split exactly evenly against Boston and NY.