CLEVELAND – North of the border, generally, and in central Alberta, certainly, baseball season tends to start late and finish early due to the weather, so while growing up in Edmonton Erik Sabrowski has played in all types of miserable conditions.
The worst?
“Some snow a few times,” the Cleveland Guardians left-hander said Friday afternoon, before relentless rain washed out Game 4 of the American League Championship Series at Progressive Field. “Early April, you're just excited to even be outside playing ball, didn't really affect you too much. Or late October kind of thing, you're just, again, excited to even still be outside.”
Given the circumstances, Guardians up 2-1 on the Tampa Bay Rays in the best-of-seven, the thought of grinding through a soggy field and winds so chilling that they prompted a freeze warning, was no biggie.
“At least it's not snowing,” Sabrowski said with a shrug.
Still, the inclement weather didn’t let up – the rain ebbed around 8 p.m. ET and the tarp was removed while the grounds-crew worked to squeegee away pools of water on the warning track but never stopped falling – and a postponement was announced shortly after 9 p.m. ET.
Game 4 now goes Saturday at 8 p.m. ET with Game 5 pushed to Sunday at 5 p.m. ET, with Games 6 and 7, if necessary, back in Tampa on Monday and Tuesday.
The starters will remain Nick Martinez for the Rays and Shawn Armstrong for the Guardians, with the now compressed schedule sure to complicate pitching plans for both teams the longer this series goes.
“Let’s go, it’s regular season, we play four in a row all the time,” said Guardians manager Stephen Vogt. “Obviously it's not ideal for either team. I think we both wanted to play today. It just wasn't in the cards.”
The decision came after hours of finagling between officials from both clubs and Major League Baseball, with conversations about what to do beginning Thursday after Game 3 ended. Friday morning, they felt there was a chance to play and decided to push for a game as long as they could.
Ultimately, “the rain didn't change,” said Rays manager Kevin Cash. “It never cleared out the way they were hoping. It started to get later in the hour, and MLB and I think both clubs did everything they could to try to get it in. Made the most sense, like, at this point and this hour, with no guarantee that there wasn't another band (of rain) coming.”
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