An Incredibly Rainy Season

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s been raining quite a bit this year. After last night’s rain out, 21 games have been effected by weather this season. 21! Out of 86! Nearly a quarter of the games so far in 2008 have seen bad weather, compared to last season at this point when only 17 had been similarly effected.

Now, as a broadcaster, the rain doesn’t usually bother me too much one way or the other. If I’m on the road by myself it will have some effect as I need to prepare my voice for at least 14 innings of baseball. With average game times for a seven innings hovering just above two hours a piece, plus pre-game and post-game shows it means I’ll have somewhere between four and half and five hours of talking. As long as I have some throat lozenges (throat lozenge, much more fun to say than cough drop) and plenty of material I’m usually fine. Home double headers are relatively easy, as I’ll usually call the first game and allow either Christian or Justin (the other two Suns broadcasters) to call game two. So that makes it a piece of cake.

As for the players though, the rain can either be a blessing or a curse, depending on the timing of the weather. If a game gets rained out or suspended on the road, it doesn’t make too much difference for the players as the visiting team usually doesn’t do nearly as much side-work before a game as the home team. So they might get to the park an hour earlier than normal, but all-in-all, not a huge change. Home games make things tougher as all of the extra work going on before a game has to either be canceled or pushed up depending on the timing of the game.

Either way though, the location of a delay is not as big of a deal as the time. To roughly quote Darnell Coles, “When you’re going good, you don’t want a rain-out; you want to play. But when you’re playing poorly, you look forward to that day off…and right now we needed that day off.”

I guess the unscheduled off-day after a 16-1 loss at the hands of the SAL North leading West Virginia Power should then be a good thing for the Suns. Either way, the Suns will be playing a pair of seven inning games against the Asheville Tourists tonight, so we’ll see what happens.

Also, just for future reference, there were just five games delayed, postponed or canceled due to weather after this point in the season in ‘07, so hopefully the worst of the weather is behind us.

Tags: Darnell Coles, General