As you may have heard by now, a nor'easter is ravaging much of the Northeast, with inches of rain and heavy winds everywhere from Boston down through D.C. It turns out that things like "inches of rain" and "heavy winds" are not, in fact, conducive to baseball, so it should come as no surprise that Sunday's regular-season finale between the Baltimore Orioles and New York Yankees is currently mired in a rain delay.
The Yankees made the announcement just after 12:30 p.m. ET, around a half-hour before the scheduled first pitch time of 1:05 p.m. ET. Of course, that first pitch time had already been bumped up a couple hours to try and avoid as much rain as possible, which underscores the problem of trying to play a baseball game in the middle of a serious storm — and why this game might not wind up happening at all.
When will the Orioles-Yankees game start on Sunday?
Well, there's a chance Sunday's game never starts. New York has yet to make any sort of announcement about a new start time, but signs are pointing to an outright cancellation. Baltimore was officially eliminated from playoff contention days ago, and the Yankees are already locked into the first AL Wild Card spot. The upshot: From a standings perspective, there's absolutely nothing at stake here.
All of which means that, unless there's a sudden and miraculous break in the weather — or at least the rain slows down enough to allow the teams to try and squeeze five innings in for record-keeping sake — it seems likely that the league will simply decide to scrap it entirely. Why force both teams to spend hours waiting around in a storm just to play a game that no one could care less about? Sure, there are player incentives and the like at stake, but surely that can be something worked out on a team level.
Yankee Stadium forecast: How much more rain is expected?
Again: It has rained a ton in the tristate area since late Friday night, and that rain is only expected to continue for the rest of the day. The radar is not pretty, and the precipitation forecast isn't any better.
Hour (ET) | Chance of precipitation |
|---|---|
1 p.m. | 76% |
2 p.m. | 85% |
3 p.m. | 85% |
4 p.m. | 85% |
5 p.m. | 85% |
The teams are likely hoping that there will be an afternoon window in which the rain is light enough to make playing an official five innings something other than a farce. Other than that, though, we seem to just be delaying the inevitable. Let everybody go home, and let the Yankees start preparing for their Wild Card series on Tuesday.
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