Daily Jolt: Mother Nature Could Rain on Opening Day Party

The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.

It's virtually impossible to spoil the first full day of regular season baseball. Opening Day is a time of boundless optimism for fans of all 30 major league teams. For one day at least, anything seems possible, even if you root for the Pirates.

Assuming, of course, there's actually something on which all those fans can focus their good vibes.

White Sox and Royals fans won't get that opportunity, at least not on Monday. Chicago postponed its 2:05 PM ET opener against Kansas City because frigid temperatures, high winds and snow are in the forecast. Lest you think the Windy City is the only baseball town threatened by bad weather, consider that snow is also looming at the traditional opener in Cincinnati between the Reds and Mets and that rain could wreak havoc in Boston, Baltimore and possibly even St. Louis.

Yes, it could be a rainy, snowy mess -- hardly the type of conditions you associate with the annual spring rebirth that is baseball season. Opening Day is supposed to make you think of chirping birds and sprouting flowers not snowblowers and galoshes.

Of course, much of this could be avoided if the Major League Baseball schedule makers would deliberately try to schedule as many Opening Day games as possible in domes and warm-weather locales.

It's bewildering, for example, that the Red Sox are opening at Fenway Park against the Tampa Bay Rays, a team that plays its home games in a dome.

Now, obviously the teams themselves (though not necessarily the players) will want to open at home at least somewhat regularly. The Red Sox will open at home for the first time in seven years. And the schedule makers do try to account for the harsher climates by including off days in the middle of opening series.

So maybe no one is to blame for this potential mess. Maybe it is simply a matter of math and geography and a limited number of dance partners, an unavoidable inconvenience.

Or maybe it's the whole system that is flawed.

It might be cliche to say it at this point -- especially after the weather fiasco at last year's World Series -- but baseball's schedule, all of it, not just Opening Day, is out of control.

The World Series could run into the first week of November this year. Most division rivals will meet more than 15 times this year at the expense of a balanced schedule. (All so we can get Red Sox-Yankees fatigue by mid-May?) And of course, the season starts a week or two earlier than it used to, in part because teams don't play doubleheaders anymore at the cost of an extra gate. Even Opening Day isn't quite the same now that ESPN broadcasts a single game the night before.

Unfortunately, many of those problems are the consequences of baseball's pursuit of the almighty dollar. Should the sport be faulted for that? Maybe, but it's certainly not any different from any other revenue-generating sport in that regard. After all, the NFL is talking about going to an 18-game schedule (why people think that's a good idea is beyond me), March Madness never ends in March and the NBA and NHL play 82-game seasons and then let 16 teams into their respective postseason tournaments.

The innocence of professional sports -- if it ever had any in the first place -- is long gone, and Opening Day (at least the ideal one) is just one of the casualties.

So what are we to do? Shake our heads and enjoy the return of baseball, even if it comes with a side of lousy weather.