King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Snow sends the Cleveland Indians to seek shelter in Milwaukee. There's a lesson there. Plus: Really bad baseball art. And: NHL playoffs.

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April 10, 2007 | The Cleveland Indians are going to do something Tuesday night they've hardly done at all lately. They're going to play baseball. They're going to play the Los Angeles Angels, and they're going to do it in Milwaukee. Call them the Cleveland Indians of Milwaukee. Ha! I'm the only one who's thought of that joke.

The series was supposed to be played in Cleveland, but it has been snowing there for a while, as you may have heard, especially if you live in Cleveland and have windows.

The Indians lost a four-game home series to the Mariners over the weekend and Monday, and what I mean by that is the games were postponed because of the snow. That's an even more rare event than losing a four-game home series to the Mariners, a trick last pulled by the Angels in July 2005.

A lot of fans and talk-radio types have been wondering why Major League Baseball schedules so many games in early April in cold-weather cities with open-air stadiums. MLB does a lot of dumb stuff, but it's kind of silly to think the brass in New York will read some online message boards, slap themselves on the foreheads and say, "Schedule April games in warm-weather cities and domes! Why didn't we think of that?"

It's not so easy. Eight of the 16 National League cities qualify as being reasonably certain that early-April games won't get rained, snowed or frozen out, but only five of the 14 American League cities do.

And that's before considering various teams' requests. Cincinnati always wants to open at home, for instance, a long-standing tradition. One of the teams in both Chicago and New York has to open at home, because they don't like to be at home at the same time, which means they can't be on the road at the same time.

Cold-weather teams don't want to be forced to open the season on a two-week road trip every year while they wait out potentially bad -- but sometimes beautiful -- weather back home. Warm-weather teams don't want to load their home schedule with April games because attendance improves in the summer, and they don't want to be loaded up with road games during the stretch drive.

Nobody's willing to shorten the season by removing games or shorten the calendar by scheduling more double-headers. Too much lost revenue.

So what are we left with? We're left with making the best of a bad situation, and the good folks of Milwaukee getting to see some American League ball again for $10. That's the price you pay -- moving the game, not $10, which is the price of field-level seats during the series -- for playing an outdoor game in outdoor stadiums, which is a good thing.

Once in a long while, nature flicks its fingers at your little plans and says, "Sorry. Try Milwaukee."

Next page: I may not know art, but that's one ugly statue! Plus: NHL playoff, er, preview