Rain 1, Baseball 0: Game rescheduled for Saturday

In a clusterfart of truly headsmacking proportions, tonight’s Minnesota @ Cleveland game was ashcanned after 2 ¹⁄₂ innings. The makeup game will take place Saturday at 12:10 Central, the second game 6:10 as originally scheduled.

What made this exceedingly frustrating is that National Weather Service forecasts all day had been predicting tonight’s storms, and predicting exactly zero rain for tomorrow.

Even so, the Twins, who were planning on using a “bullpen start” for Saturday, chose to go with their most consistent starter, Jake Odorizzi, on Friday. As predicted, the lightning came in after about 45 minutes of play, and baseballing never resumed. Accordingly, the Twins will probably need two full bullpen games tomorrow, unless they decide to run Odorizzi out there on zero rest. Which is unlikely, although that’s what the team’s “Probable Pitchers” site is saying as of right now.

(Baldelli said the Twins are “approaching it as 18 innings for the bullpen to cover.”)

Furthermore, Cleveland fans got to come to the game, pay for parking, get settled, and see 17% of a baseball game before being told to wait for two hours and then to go home. Smooth move by their house meterologist, if indeed they have one instead of trusting Ol’ Jessup’s Achy Foot Corns.

Jorge Polanco gets a home run erased, but he shouldn’t feel too bad — so did Roger Maris in 1961. Wouldn’t have beat Ruth in 144 games anyways (thanks to CG19 for the heads-up on that), but could have had 62 dingers total, assuming his bomba pace had stayed the same like in time-travel movies.

At least it’s supposed to be nice at Target Field next week!