Making a pitch to 'Play Ball' in the fall

Another round of spring storms crashed through our area Friday, bringing monsoon-like rains, local flooding, power outages, general mayhem and…more high school baseball games either canceled, suspended or postponed.

Saturday dawned bright and beautiful, the green grass rich and vibrant and the May flowers bursting with color. But skies darkened abruptly and soon delivered a series of cold showers, as Mother Nature continued the same wet and wild behavior she displays each spring.

This is a great time of year if you're a tree or a lawn or a goose. It's a festive period of re-awakening after a long, tough winter.

If your game is high school baseball, however, and your school resides in northern Illinois, well…spring is a season of madness.

So I'm joining the small but wise minority in suggesting maybe the Illinois High School Association consider, just consider, the thought of making baseball a fall sport at some point in the near future. Because, short of a tragic spring drought, these frequent and frustrating washouts will continue to make baseball season akin to hop scotch.

It's a pattern, as the weather people like to say. And each spring, it is much the same. We're not talking only April showers. We're talking thunderstorms, snow, sleet, hail, severe weather warnings, tornadoes and freeze-thaw cycles with an occasional warm, sunny day mixed in to temper the insanity.

Moving baseball season to the other side of summer is hardly a fall-fetched idea. Football coaches would hate it, because the switch might cost them a few players of their 80-man rosters. But it's a small sacrifice. Besides, you don't see many offensive tackles playing shortstop.

Athletic directors would be secretly ecstatic at the thought. Their perennial headaches with having to reschedule already-rescheduled games would be greatly alleviated, as would the constant, logistical rearranging involving umpires, groundscrews and bus drivers.

The way it is now, baseball teams spend the majority of their early season practices indoors, for it's either too cold, too wet, or too both to get on the ball diamond. Unless you dream of playing for the Twins in the Metrodome, practicing baseball in a field house is sacrilege.

Once the weather becomes borderline tolerable, practice essentially ends, because rescheduled games crowd the schedule and all but eliminate open days for practice. Worse, many teams are forced to drop games just in order to fulfill their priority conference games before the postseason begins.

And just think how many hours they spend raking fields, pouring Diamond Dry and running popsicle sticks through their cleats.

Fall baseball beckons.

Imagine if you will, high school baseball aficionados, the improved quality of play that would result. With a full summer of practice and league games leading up to the season, players are at the top of their game were high school baseball season staged in fall. Much like football does with sanctioned summer practices, so, too, could baseball.

Start baseball season to coincide with football practice in early August, and you'll have nearly three months if the season runs through mid-October. Just imagine the exciting symmetry as high school baseball builds to a climax along with Major League Baseball, two Fall Classics on different levels.

Weather would still be an issue of course. But not nearly in the same, extreme ways it is in the spring.

Take the months of April-May vs. September-October. Based on 35 years of weather record-keeping, the Chicago area averages 24 rain days during that two-month spring period, vs. 19 for the two fall months.

It rains more days in the spring around here than Seattle (23). We even beat out the thunderstorm capital of the world -- Orlando, Fla. -- for rainy days (15) during the spring.

And on the topic of spring, one other thing -- recovering from rain storms takes longer earlier in the year, vs. late in the year. Considering the ground is frozen for most of the winter, it becomes a spongy mess in spring, especially when it's repeatedly saturated with 24 days worth of rain.

Conversely, the turf in fall has had the summer to dry out and the grass has been actively growing, meaning it will more readily absorb excess water, while also allowing the dirt and infield areas to be playable much quicker -- without all that Diamond Dry.

Maybe when the IHSA takes its seventh-inning stretch this summer, they'll consider a change of seasons. "Play Ball!" has a nice ring in the fall -- most of all, because they'd actually be playing it.