With America still grieving and cross-country travel problematic, baseball Commissioner Bud Selig decided Thursday to extend the interruption of the major-league baseball season through the weekend.
He initially had hoped to resume play Friday but decided instead that major-league teams would resume play Monday.
Selig also detailed a course of action he had revealed a day earlier, saying teams will play their full 162-game schedule even though it will delay the start of the playoffs one week and could extend the World Series into November for the first time.
With three days’ play previously postponed because of the terrorists’ acts at the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the hijacked plane that crashed in western Pennsylvania, Selig agonized over whether to keep baseball stadiums dark for another three days. He admits he “changed his mind” a few times, being so undecided late Thursday morning that two teams were cleared to begin busing to the sites of Friday night games.
Selig said many factors led him to push the scheduled return back to Monday, but his questions seemed as much logistical as philosophical. He mentioned air travel among his concerns.
“I really wanted to do what I think is socially responsible,” Selig said. “Monday struck me as the right way to go.”
There are only seven games scheduled for Monday, with neither Chicago team involved. The White Sox will play the New York Yankees on Tuesday night at Comiskey Park while the Cubs play in Cincinnati, beginning a nine-game trip. With the postponements affecting six home games for the Cubs, they won’t play at Wrigley Field until Sept. 27.
“There’s no blueprint,” Cubs President Andy MacPhail said. “I don’t know that there’s any right and any wrong to this. The commissioner is charged with representing baseball in the best way he knows how. I support his decisions.”
When teams return, all players will wear American flags on their uniforms. American flags will be given to fans during all games Monday.
The regular season was scheduled to end Sept. 30 but is expected to extend through Oct. 7. The decision to retain the 162-game season allows playoff races to run their course while also giving San Francisco slugger Barry Bonds his full chance to set the home run record. He has 63 with 18 games remaining. He needs seven to catch Mark McGwire.
The details of makeup games still are being finalized, but Selig said teams probably will use Oct. 1 as a day off and then play the six-day slate of games that have been postponed in major-league baseball’s longest midseason interruption of play not related to labor problems.
First-round playoff series will begin Oct. 9, league championship series Oct. 16 and the World Series Oct. 27. Unless the Series is decided in the minimum four games, it will extend into November, with Game 7 tentatively scheduled for Nov. 4.
“I worry about weather in October,” Selig said. “Fortunately we have a lot of warm-weather teams, a lot of West Coast teams.”
If standings remained unchanged, the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians will be the only playoff teams from the Northeast or Midwest. But the Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies could complicate that picture.
All three will be within 3 1/2 games of playoff spots when the season resumes Monday, with most teams 17 or 18 games from the end of the season that began in early April.
Selig’s announcement came long after the National Football League and NASCAR had joined the PGA Tour and major-college football conferences in canceling their weekend action. As Selig weighed his decision, the Phillies left Atlanta, where they had been since Monday, to travel to Cincinnati, where they were to play the Reds on Friday night.
The Pittsburgh Pirates, meanwhile, boarded buses and headed to Chicago for their weekend series against the Cubs. According to Pirates officials, the buses traveled beyond Cleveland, almost to Sandusky, Ohio, before turning around and heading back to Pittsburgh.
“They were great,” Selig said of the Pirates and Reds. “They just wanted to know what I was going to do. I did change my mind a lot. But they did what it took so that we had a choice to play.”
MacPhail had been hoping he could focus on his team this weekend. Work is the only refuge he has found since hijacked planes turned his team’s recent collapse into an afterthought.
“At a personal level, the only periods where I have gotten over [the hurt] is when I had a task to do,” said MacPhail, a New York native. “It would have been nice to go to games, to start thinking about games. . . . I am anxious for a day when we can get back and play, do the things that are our job and provide a distraction from the things that transpired Tuesday.”
The decision essentially to turn the 24th week of the season into an unscheduled 27th week drastically alters baseball’s finish. The biggest switch is for Baltimore’s Cal Ripken Jr. and San Diego’s Tony Gwynn, who will end their Hall of Fame careers at home, not on the road.
“Right now it’s hard to really get too psyched up about that,” Ripken told the Washington Post. “In a perfect world, yeah, you’d like to be able to celebrate the end with the people who have known you the whole time, your hometown. . . . When you think about what has happened, you don’t really get too energized about baseball.”
Because their game at Tampa Bay on Monday would have been the last of a four-game series, the new schedule will force the Yankees to make an extra trip to Florida. The three-time defending champs are the only team affected in that way but it seemed all right with them. They train at Tampa’s Legends Field and planned weekend workouts there to escape the gloom in New York.
The New York Mets were scheduled to play Pittsburgh on Monday at Shea Stadium. But that three-game series has been shifted to Pittsburgh, delaying the time when New York is host to its first major sports event since the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. That date becomes Sept. 21 when the Atlanta Braves visit Shea.
Although the Cubs originally were scheduled to play 10 of their last 14 games on the road, they will finish with a 10 home games in 11 days against Houston, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. It could give them an edge in the four-way wild-card race with San Francisco, St. Louis and Los Angeles, if not the Central race in which they are six games behind the Astros.
But it’s too early for such trivial analysis. Games can wait a little longer.
“I’m really comfortable with the decision,” Selig said. “I’m almost relieved. It has been a tough week . . . tough for me, but not compared to the people in New York and Washington.”
