Rainy And Dumb At Shea

Think about how, on a daily basis, the weather affects your life. Sure, it can be a pain to carry an umbrella on the way to the car, and maybe your mood as you glance out the window from your anonymous, soulless cubicle on the fourth floor. But you can deal with it; it's mostly just something to talk about. This doesn't stop us, of course, from checking The Weather Channel and Weather.com obsessively.

But there's no time when the weather has absolute control over your life more than at a baseball game. It affects not only your mood, but where you're going, what you're doing, what your mood is, exactly how you're spending every minute of your day. So, it would stand to reason, in a weather-attentive world, we'd want to know everything we could about this specific weather, which is controlling our life so much at that particular moment. Is there a front coming in? Just passing through? Typhoon maybe?

But for whatever reason, Major League Baseball stadiums find it impossible to provide even the most rudimentary updates on the weather that has halted their professional activity. At the Cardinals' aborted 2-0 loss to the Mets last night, we sat out in the rain for an hour-and-a-half without a single public address announcer so much as saying, "hey, it's raining, so we're gonna sit out for a while." At one point, the rain completely stopped, and the fans, as fans do, began to stir. But nothing: No word, no update, no zilcho. The rain picked up again half an hour later, the ump came out of the dugout and waved his arms, and the game was over. And we still hadn't been told there had been a delay.

We understand that we're supposed to sit in the stands and buy hot dogs and beer while we try to dry off, but, you know, fans have shit to do too. We've never understood why stadiums can't simply announce what the weather looks like for those of us who don't have Blackberrys. We want to stay; that's why we came in the first place. Just let us know.

Instead, we sat, wet and ignorant, sopping up a crappy end to a crappy day.