Yankees Win After 4-Hour Rain Delay

Yankees wait four hours to beat the Orioles 5-3

Weather has not been kind to the Yankees and the Orioles this season.

They have seen games rained out early in the season and then they had one postponed thanks to Hurricane Irene down in Baltimore in August. They've played doubleheaders and they'll lose an off-day Thursday when they travel from New York to Maryland to make up the game lost to Irene after playing three times in the Bronx.

So you probably should have known that there would be heavy rain on Tuesday simply because the two teams were scheduled to play against one another. You probably wouldn't have guessed that the teams would wait four hours in a delay before deciding to start the game in the middle of rain that was just about as strong as it had been all day long.

Why would the teams choose that over postponement? Joe Girardi said that it was to avoid a doubleheader Wednesday, the only option available to make up the game because the Yankees don't really have another off day this season.

Thing is, they are going to wind up playing a doubleheader anyway. Tuesday's game ended at 2:15 in the morning and Wednesday's game is scheduled -- unsurprisingly, there's more rain falling on Wednesday -- to get underway at 1:05 in the afternoon.

That's a bit more time than you get in between two games in a day-night doubleheader, but the difference would seem to be negligible if you're worried about the cumulative impact on the bodies of your players. There's no good solution here, especially with the weather report looking just as bad on Wednesday, but the need to avoid a doubleheader couldn't just have been about protecting players when you then sent them out in conditions fit for neither man nor beast. 

The conditions wound up helping the Yankees as a pair of weather-aided defensive miscues brought them an early run. They could have helped them late when Orioles third baseman Mark Reynolds made another error, but Jorge Posada, in what might have been the last asinine baserunning mistake in a career overflowing with asinine baserunning mistakes, turned to run toward second and was easily tagged out.

No matter. Francisco Cervelli and Brett Gardner gave us our unlikeliest back-to-back homers of the season in the seventh and Mariano Rivera moved closer to the all-time saves record for a 5-3 win.

They almost certainly shouldn't have played at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night, but they did so the Yankees might as well have won the thing. Just be glad it wasn't a Red Sox game, because they'd still be playing.

Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.

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