Rain on parade

PHILADELPHIA – Those catwalks back in Tropicana Field don’t seem so bad now, do they?

Welcome to the World Series, baseball’s showcase event …

Don’t mind the small pond forming behind third base at Citizens Bank Park, and the basepaths turning into swampland.

Welcome to the Fall Classic …

Don’t be alarmed if a popup goes up in one ZIP code, gets caught in the wind, and comes down in another. Or, with the rain pouring down, the infielder acts as if he’s trying to make a catch in the shower.

We’re here at the most important moments of the summer game …

Was that the Tampa Bay manager popping from the dugout to make a pitching change wearing a drenched coat and cap with earflaps, looking as if he’s headed out to hunt ducks?

Or B.J. Upton sloshing into second base as if he were going down a water slide?

It’s the Phillies and Rays …

Not to mention a cast of a thousand grounds crew, putting down more sand on the muddy spots than they used in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Football has decided championships in blizzards and deep freezes, where the game was reduced to surviving the weather. Should baseball be different?

But at what point does coping with the elements turn into a travesty?

The World Series was right at the line, if not over it, when they pulled the plug in the sixth inning of Game 5 on Monday night. This had ceased being a recognizable baseball game.

“Borderline pathetic,” Tampa Bay pitcher David Price said. “You don’t want a World Series decided because someone slips or loses a popup because he’s being pelted in the face by rain.”

“This is one of those situations in life,” commissioner Bud Selig said, “where it’s very easy to second guess.”

As it turns out, it was only a minor humiliation. Imagine if the Tampa Bay Rays had not scored a run in the sixth to tie 2-2. Game called at the end of 5 1/2 , with Philadelphia ahead 2-1.

Congratulations world champions Phillies! Get the champagne!

How might that have played with the general public, starting in the general vicinity of Tampa-St. Petersburg?

“No, sir,” Selig said afterward, “I was not going to allow that to happen.”

All parties beforehand had decided the baseball rule of a game being official after five innings was not going to get in the way of finishing Game 5. No matter how long it took. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thanksgiving.

Baseball, by ad hoc regulations. So Game 5 picks up in the bottom of the sixth inning tonight, or whenever – the first time in history a World Series game has started and not gone nine innings.

Not that Major League Baseball had a lot of wiggle room but to try to play Monday night. The forecast for today is wind and rain. For Wednesday, it is wind and rain and snow. They are in the dome-less portion of this World Series matchup, so there was considerable motivation to slog it out.

Best they called it though, since no one has ever drowned at a World Series.

The World Series has gone on hiatus before, the longest for 10 days after the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco. The Red Sox and Reds waited out a nor’easter for three days in a delay that nearly killed interest in the 1975 World Series. But those who stayed around were rewarded with the famous Game 6.

So now we wait. Did the Phillies lose momentum? Did the Rays get second wind?

“I don’t know what to think,” Tampa Bay’s Carl Crawford.

And no one knows when the World Series will have the answers.