Wednesday BP: Inside the Giants and Tigers rain delay fiasco

Good morning, baseball fans!

In a recent article for the Detroit Free Press, Evan Petzold tells the tale of Sunday’s ridiculously long rain delay that led to the San Francisco Giants and Detroit Tigers ultimately having to postpone the game and make it up after the All Star break.

Throughout the piece, Petzold writes of frustrations on all sides as time ticked on and no one really knew what was going to happen.

The game was delayed about twenty minutes before it was scheduled to start on Sunday, and the delay lasted over five hours. There was a brief bit of rain right at the time the game was initially scheduled to start, but it cleared up pretty quickly after that and was clear for the next couple of hours.

Which led to a lot of frustrated fans, players, staff members, writers, broadcasters, etc. who were watching the sun shining for a period of time that could have held most, if not all of, a baseball game.

Which is, of course, information available to us now that it’s happened. In the moment, though, the forecast was uncertain enough to keep those making the decisions from opting to play. Tigers’ manager A.J. Hinch notes as much, saying that they did the best they could with the information available to them.

From Petzold’s reporting, it sounds like both teams had intended to play an evening game, but the Giants had a problem. They had to fly to Miami that night, and if they played a night game, their pilots wouldn’t have been able to fly due to FAA regulations. It’s unclear from the article when the Giants found this out or communicated it to the other side, but it meant a night game was off the table.

I’d like to think they didn’t have that information earlier in the day, as the intent to start the game around 6:00 pm local time seems to be what caused the game to not be postponed earlier in the day.

Either way, though, it was a day of frustration and disappointment all around, which will only compound when the game is made up, as the two teams were not scheduled to play each other again and will have to squeeze this game into what would have been a much needed day off on July 24th.

What time do the Giants play today?

The Giants wrap up this series against the Miami Marlins at 10:10 a.m. PT.