Rain &%$#!@ Delay

This is complete crap! As others before have noted, the Red Sox brass are a bunch of fuckwits when it comes to rain delays. The first game of today’s doubleheader was supposed to start at 1:20, with the second game getting underway at 8:05. The Red Sox continued to announce that the first game was “delayed” until about 3:30, when the updates stopped coming. Finally, shortly after 4 pm, they announced a start time of 5:15. But then, around 5:15, they said the game would start at 6:20.

Now, maybe I’m too dumb to understand. But once it’s 4 pm, why wouldn’t you just cancel the day game and say, “We’ll go ahead with the night game at 8, as planned.” Maybe it’s just me, but in this era when single-entry doubleheaders have gone the way of the woolly mammoth, I would rather have one game canceled and one game left alone than have both games fouled up. Now the 8 pm people are screwed, and the 1:20 people have been stuck at the park all day having $7 beers and $4 franks.

And I spent the period from 1:00 to 1:30 frantically channel-surfing and trying to figure out why the game wasn’t on TV down here in Newport. Me and Suz, my hostess down here in Rhody, then wandered from bar to bar searching–in vain!–for the Sox, because apparently Fox is too good to just keep a little “rain delay” tab at the bottom of the screen. All the bars we checked were showing the Yankee game instead, and for a chilling half-hour I thought that Newport had somehow seceded from New England and gone over to the Dark Side. Eventually, we found a bartender at the Mudville (right next to the Newport Gulls stadium) who knew that the game was delayed. Doubting him (he was more interested in the World Cup, despite the name and location of his establishment) I called Nick in a panic. Nick of course confirmed the hideous news. So Suz and I were ironically compelled by the perfidy of the Red Sox front office to watch the Yankees-A’s game AGAINST OUR WILL while waiting for the Red Sox to come on. The Yankees losing was some consolation, but not nearly enough. Not nearly enough, sportsfans.