2011 World Series: Are the St. Louis Cardinals Asking MLB for a Rainout and Why?

There is a meeting being held at  2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time today. At that meeting the St. Louis Cardinals and their general manager, John Mozeliak, will reportedly raise the possibility of postponing tonight's Game 6 of the World Series. 

Why? 

According to weather.com there is a 40 percent chance of showers at 8 p.m. tonight in St Louis. The percentage drops to 30 percent at 9 p.m. and continues to decrease throughout the remainder of the night.

So, what's going on here? 

This meeting is taking place a full six hours before the first pitch is scheduled but, it's not unprecedented because there are often same day meetings during the regular season to make decisions on games regarding evening games. When Hurricane Irene raced up the eastern seaboard on the last weekend of August, there were games postponed days in advance. 

This isn't Hurricane Irene though. In fact, the forecast is only calling for scattered showers.

I've been a baseball fan for over 30 years and I've had tickets to games that were postponed in the afternoon, and I've also sat through rain delays. But, I don't remember a game ever being called in advance, when the forecast was for a 40 percent chance of scattered showers.  

Weather forecasts aren't 100 percent correct, everyone knows that. Maybe the showers will become a steady rain tonight, maybe the St. Louis metropolitan area is in for one of those long wet fall nights that so many parts of this nation are used to experiencing. It doesn't look that way though. Not now, not at almost 2 p.m. on game day.

Cardinals general manager sees it differently though.

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"I also think it makes a lot of sense not to play if it's going to be sort of stop-and-go baseball and we're going to be pulling the tarp multiple times," Mozeliak said during a radio interview.

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I agree that sitting through rain delays is no fun at all. Watching the tarp being put on the field and then be taken off can be pretty boring for baseball fans. So can pitching changes, though. If Major League Baseball is going to start being this concerned with the weather then I think they should scrap the all-star game determining home-field plan, and just play the World Series in a rotating warm weather location every October.

Is this a bit of the behind the scenes strategy by Cardinal's manager Tony LaRussa? It could be.

The Cardinals are in an uncharacteristic bind right now. All teams endure plenty of losing in baseball. Even a 100 win team will have to deal with 62 losses. This Cardinals team is also used to playing with their backs against the wall as well. From late August through the end of the regular season, they played baseball knowing that their fate could be sealed by any regular season loss, but that didn't happen, and the Cardinals eventually secured a playoff birth on the final night of the season.

The current bind is unique because it was brought about by the two most important people in the dugout in St. Louis. Their manager, Tony LaRussa, and their superstar, Albert Pujols. I'm not about to engage in ripping either one of them for their mistakes on Monday night in Texas. Pujols had the right to call for the hit-and-run, he had more than earned it over his spectacular career. That was an awful time for a mistake but people make mistakes.

Tony LaRussa has been setting the standards by which bullpens in baseball are used since the late 1980s. One can agree or disagree with the micromanaging methods by which he runs his bullpens, but you'd be hard pressed to make an argument that it hasn't been influential on baseball as a whole, or that he hasn't had a fair amount of success with it. He made a major gaffe on Monday though, and to his credit he admitted it.

Still, one gets the feeling that the Cardinals are a bit shell-shocked by the current situation. When St. Louis woke up on Sunday morning they had a 2-1 World Series lead, they had reclaimed home-field advantage, they had their superstar hitting in a zone, in which he had set a new single game standard for excellence in the World Series. In short, things looked very good.

On Tuesday morning they woke up down 3-2 in the series, their best pitcher was not able to secure a win in Game 5, and now St. Louis was starting down the specter of needing to win two games in a row—something they've yet to do in this World Series—without their best pitcher on the mound.

So, maybe the Cardinals internally feel like one more day off to gather some confidence and rest their bullpen would do them well. They're probably right because Chris Carpenter is the only guy on that St Louis staff who LaRussa seems comfortable with allowing to pitch deep into a game. That means LaRussa is counting on using his bullpen quite liberally the rest of the series. None of that means tonight's game should be postponed though.