Some things are just plain dumb. Like playing baseball in November.
Yet that’s exactly what the Astros and Braves will be doing. They’ll take the field for Game Six of the World Series tonight — and might even play a concluding Game Seven tomorrow.
Roger Angell famously labeled baseball the Summer Game, but its championship is now decided on the cusp of the skiing season.
This year’s World Series is being staged in two Sunbelt markets — and Houston’s stadium has a dome — yet it has not been immune from foul conditions. Games Three and Four were played in a frigid mist in Atlanta, where the temperature hovered in the low to mid-50s both evenings. Not exactly baseball weather.
The thermometer has dipped much lower in the past, of course. Many of us oldtimers remember when Bowie Kuhn, baseball’s befuddled commissioner from 1969 to 1984, would sit coatless at playoff games, somehow hoping to imply that the temperature really hadn’t plummeted into the low 40s. It was an ineffective ploy.
(An unrelated question for another time: Can anybody explain why Kuhn was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame? Anyone at all? Me neither.)
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But the weather isn’t the only problem. There was a time when baseball dominated the sports pages until the end of the World Series. The National Football League started play each September, yet its young commissioner, Pete Rozelle, would wait until baseball’s final out in mid-October to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne.
“Here’s to the beginning of football season,” he would always say.
Rozelle abandoned this ritual by the end of the 1960s, when football began to draw even with baseball in national popularity polls. (It would shoot ahead in the 1970s.)
The shoe now is on the other foot. If you looked at ESPN’s website yesterday morning, you would have noticed that the top five stories were about Sunday’s NFL action. Only then would you have seen a story about the Astros’s come-from-behind victory to stay alive in the World Series.
Baseball is crowning its champion in the heart of football season, and much of the country is paying no attention whatsoever.
So how did this happen? Let’s examine the time spans for the World Series over the past century, sampling every 10th season:
1921: October 5-13
1931: October 1-10
1941: October 1-6
1951: October 4-10
1961: October 4-9
1971: October 9-17
1981: October 20-28
1991: October 19-27
2001: October 27-November 4
2011: October 19-28
2021: October 26-November 2 (or 3)
It could be argued that September would be the best month for baseball’s playoffs. It’s still warm throughout the country then, and the football season is in its earliest stages.
But the first few days of October are nearly as good, and baseball stayed comfortably within that range into the 1960s.
Then came divisional play in 1969, along with a new round of league championship series. That pushed the schedule into mid-October, as you can see in the entry for 1971, though still not dangerously close to November.
The real problem began in 1981, when the players struck from mid-June to mid-August. The owners added a third round of playoffs in an effort to recoup lost revenue, thereby delaying the World Series to the end of the month (as you can see above).
Those expanded playoffs were conceived as a one-year expedient, but the owners found that they enjoyed the added income. They consequently decided to expand the league championship series from five to seven games in 1985, then added a first wild-card team in 1995 and a second in 2012.
More playoff action meant more games in frigid conditions. The first foray into November came in 2001, when the regular season was extended a week because of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The World Series, as you can see in the list above, didn’t start until October 27 and continued until November 4.
Six subsequent World Series have dragged on into November: 2009 (Phillies and Yankees), 2010 (Giants and Rangers), 2015 (Mets and Royals), 2016 (Cubs and Indians), 2017 (Astros and Dodgers), and 2021.
Expansion of the playoffs logically should have been accompanied by a reduction of the regular season. The majors should have cut the 162-game grind — baseball lifers always refer to the season as a grind, as if that’s a good thing — and settled on a schedule of 154 or even 144 games.
That would have allowed them to wrap up the season by Labor Day or mid-September at the latest. The playoffs could have been staged in pleasant weather at a time when football’s hold on the populace isn’t quite as strong.
But no. What we’ve actually got is the Summer Game being played under suboptimal conditions in Atlanta, going head to head with college football and the NFL.
Keep in mind that baseball got lucky this year with two Southern teams in the World Series. Imagine if two of this year’s Northern playoff qualifiers had squared off instead.
Game Five might have been held in the National League cities of St. Louis (where it was 51 degrees at gametime on Sunday night, dropping to 45 by 10 p.m.) or San Francisco (61 degrees with a brisk wind off the ocean).
Then we’d be on to Game Six tonight in an American League town such as Boston (a forecast of 51 degrees at gametime with a decent chance of rain) or Chicago (40 degrees with winds of 14 miles per hour).
Just imagine Bowie Kuhn sitting in the stands on the South Side of Chicago, buffeted by northwesterly gales as the temperature dropped into the upper 30s. Everybody around him would have been bundled up in knit caps and winter coats. Even the players would have been dressed for arctic conditions.
But not Kuhn. He would have been warmed by his absolute belief in the sanctity of baseball’s schedule — and, of course, by his ever-present shirtsleeves.
He absolutely would have loved it.