Meterologists fight back!

I wanted to give this its own special post: As you might know, baseball czar Bud Selig blamed bad weather forecasting for his lamentable decision to start the World Series in the rain on Monday. Now, I will be the first to admit that blaming the weatherman/weatherwoman is one of the oldest and most noble of all American pastimes -- and I fully appreciate Bud pulling out that card when he was backed into a corner. This is a lot like people blaming the media for the mess they're in. I say: Go for it.

However, I will say, it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I obviously do not know who baseball trusts with weather forecasting -- I have speculated that Bud uses the Polyanna Weather Service, Rose-Colored Meteorology and the Rain, Rain Go Away Weather Center -- but I do know that, at the very least, the POSSIBILITY of heavy rain and nasty conditions was well known and much discussed. As I mentioned in a previous post, the weatherman on local television (I believe he was from the local Fox channel) said point blank that there would be light rain at the start, the rain would get heavier at 10 p.m., and that once the rain got heavy it would not stop any time soon. I mean, that's the local Fox weather guy -- didn't have to go too far to get that accu-weather forecast, you know?

Anyway, when the night turned into a fiasco, Bud fought back and on several occasions ripped the meteorologists who gave him the information he needed to make his misguided and wrongheaded decision. Turned out it was all their fault, the evil weather-folks of our nation. They gave him bad information. What could he do? They told him there would only be a light rain, about a tenth of an inch. What could he do? It's no exaggeration to say that in the span of one press conference, Bud ripped the weather people at least three times. Maybe more.

Well, it just so happens that brilliant reader Owen Doherty is a meteorologist and, based on his resume, one of the smartest people on earth. Owen is a Ph.D. student at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at Stony Brook University, which of course, has a great football team -- go Barometers!*

*Actually, Stony Brook is the SeaWolves, and the football is not all that great though the SeaWolves are coming off a tight 28-24 victory over Coastal Carolina (school of sudden Chiefs sensation Tyler Thigpen).

Anyway, Owen wrote this brilliant blog post breaking down the hour-by-hour radars and showing, pretty conclusively, what I rather callously guessed: There's no way they should have started the game.