Get a Roof!
Which Major League Baseball stadiums suffer from postponed games due to weather the most?
Anyone who knows me knows I love baseball. It’s by far my favorite sport. I split my allegiance between Philly and Houston, but the Phillies have been my team since I was a kid. I’ve always believed that MLB needed an in-house meteorologist to do weather stuff and take the decision of whether or not to play or continue a game out of the hands of the umpires. It just made sense from a safety and common sense perspective. But I’ve learned over time that many teams and/or stadiums have established relationships with weather vendors, forecast services, local forecasters, or even have meteorologists on staff. So it’s not like they’re operating from nothing. Still, I will freely admit that “MLB’s Meteorologist” would be the ultimate dream job, I think.
Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I said to myself, “Self, it really does seem like a lot of baseball games are getting postponed due to weather.” Me being me, I decided to look into the issue. Turns out, it really hasn’t been too bad a year on the inclement weather front in baseball. So far this season, 18 games have been rained out or postponed due to inclement weather. Since 2015 (excluding the 2020 COVID season), we have averaged about 22.4 rainouts by this time.
I went back and looked at every season since 2015 to see how many games were postponed due to weather. I ignored 2020 due to the shortened COVID season. I made sure that the 2021 games were due to weather and not COVID. And there were things like civil unrest and tragedies sprinkled in as well, so those games were not included for these purposes.
But going a step beyond, I wanted to understand which MLB stadiums have the most disruptive weather. I think a lot of people think about cold weather in Minnesota and Colorado. Neither ballpark lands in the top 10. Maybe Boston or New York or Philly or Washington land at the top? More on that in a second.
On the flip side, the only outdoor ballpark to not have a rainout since 2015 is Dodger Stadium. The team involved in the fewest rainouts since 2015? The Oakland Sacramento A’s. They have only had 5 postponements including one home game in Oakland. Logically, when you play in a division with now 3 teams that have indoor ballparks (Houston, Seattle, and Arlington), that makes sense. Their other division opponent is in SoCal and has had merely 4 games rained out since 2015 in Anaheim.
So who needs a roof?
Any guesses?
Cleveland rocks — except at baseball scheduling. Since 2015, 35 home games have been rained out or postponed in Cleveland due to bad weather. Mistake on the lake, indeed. That bests the next worst ballpark which is just a short distance northwest in Detroit. A total of 33 games have been postponed up that way since 2015.
Coming in behind Cleveland and Detroit, we shift over to the Mid-Atlantic. Washington has had 30 home games washed out since 2015. Baltimore is in 7th place but only has four fewer games rained out. Rounding out the top 10 are the New York Mets, Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and St. Louis Cardinals.
An oddity (I thought) was the Cubs having 21 rainouts, whereas the White Sox had 28. Like a lot of baseball stuff on the Southside recently, I guess it’s just some bad luck.
So it’s one thing to have home games disrupted, but which team is most frequently disrupted, home or away? The Tigers and Guardians come in at the top with 57 and 54 games postponed since 2015, respectively. Following them, the Mets and Yankees. The White Sox, Orioles, and Nationals follow suit. Then the Atlanta Braves, who have had 18 rainouts at home and another 19 on the road. Last nugget? The team with a roof that is most frequently disrupted by rainouts on the road is the Toronto Blue Jays. They have had 21 games postponed since 2015, likely due to their frequent visits to New York, Boston, and Baltimore. They also had 2 additional games added because of their time in Buffalo in 2021.
Were there any real surprises here? Pittsburgh and Cincinnati are surprisingly pleasant, especially given their proximity to the worst places in Cleveland and Detroit. Pittsburgh has only had 12 home games rained out, while Cincinnati has had only 15. Another regional quirk that was interesting was Kansas City having 8 fewer rainouts than St. Louis (13 vs. 21). Also, Philly only saw 18 rainouts versus the 26 in Baltimore and 29 in Queens.
It’s hard to make a whole lot of sense of this because the schedule and luck more than anything drive these statistics. That said, it’s pretty evident that if you like playing baseball without being hindered by weather, you want to avoid Cleveland, Detroit, or New York. Perhaps when the time comes for a new ballpark in Cleveland, a roof will be considered. Or we will just accept the weather as a necessary element in the world of baseball.
I do plan on continuing to keep track of this and trying to backfill farther in time. By doing that, scheduling influences and luck should gradually dissipate and a more statistically sound analysis may emerge.
It will also be interesting to see how time has impacted trends in rainouts. Are we growing less tolerant of playing in bad weather as forecasting improves and injury risk is considered more? Or could a climate signal emerge in the noise here also, where rains are proving to be more disruptive? We still see baseball games played in pretty miserable weather. But is tolerance, precision, or the climate impacting the changes we see in data over time? More than anything, this is mostly a fun exercise to show off which teams have the most disruptive weather impacts on their scheduling.
If you go back far enough, I think you will get to the rainout at the Astrodome because the roads were flooded and the teams couldn’t get to the ball park.