Major League Baseball is making adjustments to its 2019 master schedule as a result of the historic run of poor weather and game postponements this month in the Northeast and Midwest.
The developing shifts in next year’s schedule primarily involve concentrating games in April and September, where the threat of weather postponements is highest, to intradivision matchups. Those games, typically involving teams that play each other 18 or 19 times a year, allow for easier rescheduling since the road clubs make multiple trips to the home market during the course of the year.
“The thing we’ve been focusing on for 2019 is emphasizing in-division games early and late in the season when the weather is potentially bad,” said Chris Marinak, MLB executive vice president of strategy, technology and innovation. Marinak oversees the league’s schedule development.
The new season has seen poor weather wreak havoc on teams in the Midwest and Northeast.getty images
“The benefit of that is when you have games in the division, you have opportunities to make those games up, and it’s not a burden to have a club play a doubleheader or add a game to an off day at the front end of a series. We’re trying not to have a West Coast team come into the East in the first week of April, getting two games rained out or snowed out, and have to make another coast-to-coast trip,” Marinak said.
The 2019 schedule is set to be finalized by the league and approved by the MLB Players Association this summer, and then released publicly in September. This year’s schedule included four extra off days for each club, which have been used to help manage the current spate of reschedulings.
Through April 18, MLB had endured 25 weather-related postponements this season, equaling the worst March and April for the league since tracking began in 1986.
Several individual clubs have been setting records, too. The Detroit Tigers have already had six postponements, more than any full season in Comerica Park’s 18-year history. The Minnesota Twins lost an entire weekend series from April 13 to 15 against the Chicago White Sox due to snow, the first time in Target Field’s eight years that three consecutive games have been postponed.
And for many other games that were played, raw, wet conditions have depressed attendance. Through the first three weeks of the season, MLB attendance is down more than 8 percent. But Marinak refused to give up on the vital turnstile counts breaking even or even potentially showing an increase for the season once clubs use the warm summer months to dig out of the current attendance hole.
“You look at some of the venues where the decline so far is significant, 20, 30 percent; they’re not going to be down 20, 30 percent for the full year,” Marinak said.
