Major League Baseball’s Poor Post-Lockout Playoff Planning Exposed With ALDS Game 5 Rainout

Maybe it was that time in high school or college when the printer went haywire while printing out the term paper you’d waited all semester to research and write. Maybe it was the wireless crashing at the 11th hour of that project you’d been assigned weeks earlier. Or maybe it was the time that tractor trailer tried navigating a parkway, ensuring a particularly tardy arrival to an appointment for which you were running late anyway.

We’ve all been there, when the frustration over something out of our control going wrong at the end of a frantic sequence ends any hope of smoothly concluding a chaotic sprint. And we’ve all been on the wrong end of the subsequent scolding — from a teacher, a boss or the family member or friend we were en route to seeing — that while it wasn’t our fault the printer, wireless or tractor trailer driver went haywire, our previous planning and preparation or lack thereof left us vulnerable to unforeseen circumstances cropping up at the most inopportune time. And eventually, that frustration yielded some begrudging self-awareness, and perhaps a commitment to try to do better next time.

It’d be awfully nice if Monday’s poorly timed rainout of Game 5 of the AL Division Series had the same effect on the powers that be running Major League Baseball.

It’s no one’s fault buckets of rain arrived shortly after the scheduled first pitch between the Yankees and Guardians, lasted longer than expected and didn’t end until just beyond the point when the game could have realistically begun. In a narrow vacuum, Major League Baseball did the right thing by trying to wait out the rains — so that whomever won Game 5 had a chance to fly to Houston early Tuesday well ahead of Wednesday’s scheduled AL Championship Series opener — before postponing the game at 9:37 PM and rescheduling it for today at 4:07 PM.

But the rainout arriving at the end of a sequence in which the Yankees and Guardians were scheduled to play their fourth game in as many days served as the latest reminder of the series of playoff scheduling difficulties self-inflicted by Major League Baseball stretching all the way back to March.

Commissioner Rob Manfred will spend the length of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement telling anyone who will listen the owner’s lockout didn’t result in any lost regular season games. But the lockout did force the regular season to begin a week late and left MLB squeezing its newly expanded playoffs into the same time frame in which the playoffs were conducted in 2021, when the AL wild card game was played Oct. 5 and Game 7 of the World Series was scheduled for Nov. 3 (the Braves closed out the Astros one night earlier in Game 6).

This year’s postseason is also scheduled to be completed with no more than 30 days elapsing between the start of the four wild card series on Oct. 7 and a potential Game 7 of the World Series being scheduled for Nov. 5. But to squeeze everything in, off-days were eliminated between Games 4 and 5 of the Division Series and between Games 5 and 6 of the LCS.

Yet in another attempt to bring another March Madness-like element to the expanded playoffs, MLB scheduled all four Division Series to begin Oct. 11 and thus had to stagger the series by adding an off-day between Games 1 and 2 of each AL Division Series. So the Yankees and Guardians worked out at Yankee Stadium on a splendid afternoon last Wednesday before Thursday’s game was postponed hours ahead of first pitch due to a miserable forecast. And of course, the Yankees and Guardians ended up playing in the only Division Series to go the distance.

A normally scheduled Division Series round still would leave the eventual Yankees-Guardians winner sprinting to Houston and opening the ALCS with no rest. But the Game 5 rainout and subsequent lack of travel day would have felt like an unpredictable quirk and not an entirely avoidable debacle that unfolded in slow motion over the course of six days.

Don’t worry, though. Subsequent playoff schedules are sure to take this worst-case scenario into effect. Just like you finished all term papers ahead of time and continue to complete all work projects ahead of schedule and leave 15 minutes early for every appointment. Right?