They tried to play baseball in Cleveland on Monday and — surprise, surprise — it snowed.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, like all newspapers, is fascinated with weather. And they’re milking the story for all it’s worth.

On Monday, Alejandro introduced you to the Plain Dealer’s new flash-based video game, “Snowball!“

That game was lame.

But the Plain Dealer’s latest feature, a time-lapse video of the grounds crew fighting to keep the Prog field in playing shape, is pretty cool. So cool, that it has earned the official Umpbump seal of approval.
See, technology isn’t all bad.

Last weekend’s Mariners-Indians series was postponed due to snow. Now MLB is talking about sending the Indians to California to play their upcoming series against the Angels, rather than force the Angels to play in Cleveland, as originally scheduled.What is MLB to do to prevent these cold weather cancellations? Some people think the league shouldn’t schedule games in the midwest during the season’s opening week. But as the AP points out, it’s been tried and it didn’t work so well:

Baseball tried to work around the cold a decade ago, without great success. After enduring a snowout at Boston’s Fenway Park, a snowy afternoon at Yankee Stadium and cold in Detroit and Chicago in 1996, baseball remade the schedule for 1997, using all five covered fields then in the majors and every West Coast site.

No brainer, right?

After teams in the East and Midwest got home, eight games were wiped out by weather on the season’s second Saturday, raising that year’s total to 17.

What really needs to be done is the league needs to shorten the season from 162 games to a more sane 150, or even 140. But they’ll never do that. That would mean (gasp) a loss in revenue. So they’ll keep playing the first two weeks of the season, and the last two weeks of the playoffs, in bitter cold weather.