Let them play: Mother Nature wreaks havoc on Valley League schedule

By Jeremy Stafford - jstafford@nvdaily.com

This week the sky has been an aesthetic blue canvas, speckled with an occasional puff of a white cloud.

But the past few weeks have hardly been as pleasant.

To the dismay of Valley Baseball League players, coaches and management, the region has been drenched by rainstorms, postponing games across the area.

There are those days when early downpours make postponements inevitable, and so players can enjoy a rare summer day away from the diamond. But only a few weeks into this young season, players are itching to get out onto the field, even if it's just for a practice.

"We shouldn't have any problem with keeping the players here," said Jim Phillips, the Valley League treasurer and official scorer of the Winchester Royals concerning the availability of players on makeup days. "They all understand that, and most of them want to play anyway, so they don't like the rain dates any more than management does."

After all, the players didn't move to Winchester or Front Royal or New Market for the summer just to watch sheets of rain streak across the window panes of their host families' homes.

They want to throw a baseball. They want to take in the smell of the summer air at Bridgeforth Field and dive for grounders in the Bing Crosby dirt.

But for a good part of the first two weeks of the Valley League season, that air has been damp with humidity, and the dirt has become a sloppy muck.

In Woodstock, the downpours have been relentless.

"Our rains have come right before the games and just totally trashed the field to the point where you couldn't get it ready," Woodstock coach Donn Foltz said. "The rainouts we have had have been absolute monsoons ... right before the game, where the whole field's covered with water."

Woodstock has had six rainouts to date, and has made up only two games. And with only one day each week -- usually a Monday -- set aside for makeup days, Foltz's River Bandits will likely play baseball every day until the Valley League All-Star game on July 12.

Foltz said that, often, he simply waits until his ruined field has dried enough to rework it for the next game, or the next downpour; but Front Royal coach Joe Scarano has had no such luxury.

"It's been expensive for us to keep our field ready," Scarano said. "We've used a lot of material to keep it ready, so that kinda hurts a little bit."

With the unusual amount of turface -- a clay material used to soak up excess water on athletic fields -- the Cardinals have used to keep the field at Bing Crosby Stadium in playing condition, the Front Royal organization has had to dip into profits from ticket sales and other sorts of income.

Scarano said that the unusual amount of rain will likely affect the way he manages his team in the future, when his team could suffer, as Woodstock is now, from a long stretch of consecutive games.

"Everybody I talked to has told me that this is an unusual amount of rain that we've had so far," Scarano said. "And so yeah, the rainout dates have definitely changed the dynamic of the season. Teams will have to play doubleheaders, teams aren't gonna have as many off days, if any.

"It's gonna definitely make teams use everybody. They're gonna have to use all their pitching -- it definitely changes your plans as a manager."

But for the time being, players are still relatively fresh. Late nights don't seem to bother them come game time, and playing three weeks of consecutive baseball, while it takes some time to get used to, is still bearable.

However, should a team's rain dates become exhausted later in the season, and should there still be postponed games left to be made up, the once fresh players will be left to play in long, grueling doubleheaders.

"Hopefully we'll be able to work around [scheduling doubleheaders]," Philips said. "Most doubleheaders, I think, will be seven-inning games, so that would help some."

Phillips said that the decision on whether or not a game will be made up in a doubleheader is made by the owners and coaches of both teams involved. Otherwise, the game must be made up on the first date available for the two clubs.

Still, coaches understand that rain delays and postponements are one of those unfortunate parts of baseball that can't be controlled. And if there are enough rainouts further down the road to warrant doubleheaders or an extended regular season, so be it.

"The physical demands will be a lot higher on the guys, but I still think that the better teams will come out on top, even with those doubleheaders," Scarano said. "But we'll get through it, I think the league will get through it.

"It's just part of what you do, and it's not the biggest issue, I don't think, that we face, but it certainly is an issue, for sure."

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