2012 MLB Schedule: More Cold Weather Games

The mental defects who concoct the schedule for Major League Baseball are at it again, for some reason insisting on staging games during opening weekend at the beginning of April in cold-weather cities, leaving perfectly good warm-weather stadiums and domes empty. Judging by Wednesday’s release of every team’s tentative schedule, they didn’t learn from previous seasons when games were snowed-out or players and fans suffered in arctic temperatures.

There are enough warm-weather teams and domes to allow the opening weekend to be played in comfort, if not the first two weeks of the season. These are the teams that should host early-April games (“x” denotes which teams are hosting this season):

National League
x-Astros
Braves
x-Brewers
x-Diamondbacks
Dodgers
Giants
Marlins
x-Padres

American League
x-Angels
x-A’s
Blue Jays
Mariners
x-Rangers
x-Rays
Royals

So only eight of the 15 venues that should be open for business are hosting, leaving stadiums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta and Kansas City (sometimes cold, but the likely warmest of the remaining cold-weather cities) empty, and ignoring domes in Miami, Seattle and Toronto.

Just for the record, the new Miami Marlins will open their stadium on Wednesday, 4/4 for a single game, then travel to chilly Cincinnati for their weekend series, where it snowed on Opening Day this season, by the way.

I mean, who thought it was a good idea for the Dodgers and Padres to open against each other? Or the Mariners and A’s? Or the Blue Jays leaving their nice warm dome to play in icy Cleveland? Or the Mets opening against the Braves in New York?

From decisions like these to Sunday’s 9/11 hat nonsense, it shows just how clueless Bud Selig and MLB can be.