My .02.

There is no way that major league teams that now average as much as twice the per game attendance they did back in the double header days would ever agree to schedule double headers. Once upon a time, double headers could be counted on to bring in enough more attendance (without having to pay for employee salaries for a second date) to make them fiscally worthwhile. That time is gone.

What baseball *needs* to do is start the season a week earlier and loosen up the rules on rainouts. If it’s a money thing, rainouts can be made up in EITHER ballpark, with the scheduled home team getting the home team’s share of the ticket sales for makeups forced to move. Teams that need to give up an off day should do so. Allowing teams to expand the roster to 26 during any stretch of games where they are playing at least 14 days in a row because of makeup games would mollify the players union while allowing some relief to the pitching staffs, without forcing the poorer teams to carry an extra player year round. And then, given that all season will be enough time to make up the rained out games, the playoffs will begin sooner, and we might not be facing Halloween baseball.

Because, and lets be real about this, when the weather gets really cold, it changes the game. Fastball pitchers stay effective. But fly balls don’t carry as well. Breaking pitches don’t break as well because it’s harder to grip the ball adequately. The two effects tend to cancel each other out at the team level, but some great sluggers become warning track sluggers instead, some pitchers get hit harder, and in general it changes the nature of the teams. I don’t think games late in October are fair to the players or the fans, especially with all the game starting at night instead of in the afternoon. So I think we would get fairer, more representative World Series games if we played them earlier. I know Fox is paying billions of dollars, but even an 8:00 p.m. start instead of 8:30 would be prime time for the east coast and a big help for kids staying up late and games ending before the cold weather really changes the game after nightfall. I’ve been wrong before.

Ordinarily I would assume that the owners wouldn’t care about bad weather, but it’s got to hurt ratings to have games postponed and suspended, and it’s got to hurt attendance in some markets to play early season games in arctic weather.

The best solution would be to go back to 154 games per season, so you could start later and finish earlier, but the owners would never agree to giving up 8 games per season, too much lost revenue and money is the deciding factor in everything to do with billion dollar businesses.

I wish baseball wasn’t a multibillion-dollar business but it is, and once that kind of money gets in a business, it takes over and never goes away until the business has every last penny squeezed out of it and collapses. I preferred baseball when it was a smaller business, with smaller sums of money at stake, but those days are long gone.

So the choice now is either to have baseball continue as a multibillion dollar empire where so much money is at stake that nothing else matters, or else it stops being profitable and all the money goes away and the whole thing collapses. So of those poor choices I will take the big business setup we have now.

The owners could benefit themselves in the long run by taking better care of their product and not being so craven when it comes to TV issues, but they are all big businessmen and have more interest in profits right now and the next five years than they do in thinking long term. Buy, maximize profits for a few years, and then sell for more profit, no need to think long term. That’s how big business seems to be these days.

One more: I remember being away on business and missing my daughter’s first steps. I was crushed at the time. But you know, I’ve seen about 9 billion since then and hope to see 9 billion more.

On the bright side, my 8-year-old son is a big Buccaneers fan and we’ve scored some tickets to the Chiefs game this Sunday. So he gets Halloween and his first big time sporting event in the same w/e. As a lifelong Chiefs fan, I didn’t have the heart to try to convert him when he first gave his heart to the Bucs. (He loves that skull on the logo) Ah well, at least he should enjoy the game.

Looks like tomorrow’s try at baseball could be snowed out!!!!!

Ask Harry Kalas to show you the Richie Ashburn clip they used to show on tv during rain delays.

Go Phillies!!!!