“If baseball insists upon playing 162 regular-season games, three postseason rounds and the World Baseball Classic every four years,” warns Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal,  “weather problems will continue to disrupt the World Series.”  And that’s to say nothing of Ken’s paymasters insisting on evening start times for the Fall Classic.   The Chicago Tribune’s Rick Morrissey seems equally troubled, insisting “when the Phillies were jumping on each other Wednesday night after winning the World Series, they weren’t celebrating. They were trying to stay warm.” (link taken from Repoz and Baseball Think Factory)

A wonderful solution would be for baseball to start the season April 15 rather than April 1 and end the regular season Sept. 15 instead of Sept. 30. That’s correct: a 130-game schedule.

Come to think of it, cutting April and September entirely from the regular season wouldn’t be such a bad idea. The season is wayyy toooooo lllllooooooonnnnnnng.

Now I know this would play havoc with statistics. Records we hold dear would likely never be broken again because of the shortened schedule. But let’s keep in mind that the steroids era has taken a sledgehammer to the record books anyway. The home run records, in particular, are silly.

Anyone who has had to sit through a game in the spring knows it can be a wretched experience, at least in Chicago, especially when the wind has kicked up and the cold air hasn’t received the memo about summer being somewhere on the horizon.

What we saw this week made no sense. Why allow weather to be the biggest factor at the exact time the games mean everything?

Assuming the owners don’t like my idea of a shorter season”assuming, while we’re at it, that they don’t like being flogged with a birch switch”what about playing the World Series at a neutral, warm-weather site? Sacrilege, I know. But if football can do it, why can’t baseball?

When precisely isn’t weather a major factor?  If the World Series is too important to be played under frigid conditions, can the Texas Rangers petition to play the entire summer at a neutral site?