Although yesterday’s very early Cubs/Cardinals game postponement had some incidental effects that will probably prove beneficial to the Cubs, team Business President Crane Kenney wants to make sure folks know that there wasn’t any fishy business going on.
“It [was] entirely weather-related,” Kenney told David Kaplan and David Haugh on their radio show earlier today. “No different than any other game that we’ve called …. With a forecast of 70 percent chance of rain beginning at 6 o’clock and wind chills below freezing, we thought rather than have our fans come sit through a long rain delay or sit out in the cold, we thought we’d let them know early.”
While calling games as early as happened yesterday isn’t common, it’s more common early in the season than later (because there are plenty of opportunities to make games up). The Cubs have definitely called games before on anticipation of nasty conditions.
I think this was just one of those things where the forecast made it sensible to postpone the game, and there were a lot of ancillary reasons to go with that instinct. The fact that it wound up not raining at Wrigley Field, well, that’s like lining the ball hard right at a defender*: nothing you can do about it.
*(Which Chris Coghlan just did with runners on first and third with two outs against Lance Lynn. So it’s on my brain.)