This Just In: The Midwest Isn't Built For April Baseball

It's one of my favorite all-time sayings.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result."

Enter Major League Baseball.

It keeps trying to convince Mother Nature that baseball can be played throughout North America in the month of April. This month, and many of the April's preceding it, proved otherwise.

Milwaukee is benefiting from the brutally harsh spring, snagging a bonus Indians/Angels series from snow-socked Cleveland this week. Good thing Miller Park has a lid, though, as our temps linger in the 40's with a foot of snow due in Southeast Wisconsin Wednesday.

Northern U.S. fans continue to shiver--those in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other places don football duds for the boys of summer.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Seattle, Anaheim, Arizona, L.A., San Francisco, San Diego, Arlington, Houston, Miami, Minnesota, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Toronto and Tampa Bay should all start their seasons at home--they're either warm, or domed. You might have to roll the dice at a few other venues, but the remedy is right in front of Commissioner Bud Selig's face.

Then again, he's been known to have his head turned on occasion when that happens.

"We do the best we can," Commissioner Bud Selig told MLB.com Monday night as the Diamondbacks opened their home schedule against the Reds after four frigid games against the Nationals at RFK Stadium. "We try to squeeze 162 games into a 182-day season. And it's very difficult. You try to make little changes, but you can't please everybody."

He's not alone.

"If somebody can predict weather for me 18 months in advance we'd be happy to do it another way," added Katy Feeney, Major League Baseball's senior vice president of scheduling and club relations, when reached in New York on Monday. "But nobody has been able to do that."

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, Kathy, and predict that the weather in Wisconsin next April will SUCK. May's not a mortal lock for sunshine and 80 degrees, either. June? Hit-and-miss. And, I can remember ordering hot freakin' chocolate at a 4th of July game at County Stadium.

The warm-weather D-Rays opened this year in frosty Yankee Stadium, and the dome-home Twins were on the road, too. Why?

Money.

"The warm weather teams don't want to be heavily home in April and May, either," she said. "They want their June, July and August dates (after school lets out), too. Plus, if you go by that logic, would you have any of the Florida teams or the eastern teams at home during hurricane season? And that's June through September."

Yeah, and we have tornadoes here in the Midwest, so by that logic, we should do April through September games in someone's basement.

Feeney says MLB tried the warm-weather angle a few season ago--only to run into unseasonably cold weather in late April. The game adopted the you-can't-win-for-losing mantra, and went back to it's old, cold ways.


Fix it, Commissioner. You insist baseball is in a fan-friendly renaissance--do the game's constituency a solid by making sure we don't have to dress like we're shoveling snow. We'll be doing that later today, getting a foot of it out of our driveways in time to watch tonight's Indians/Angels game under the Miller Park dome...while our Brewers play on the road in Florida.

Does that make ANY sense? Or, is it the definition of insanity?