Yankees-Giants weather debacle didn't have to happen

Though he wouldn’t fully come out and say it, Friday night appeared to mark one of the first known occasions of a manager petitioning to lose a major-league baseball game. And Aaron Boone was completely right in doing so.

It was a strange moment, but a necessary one. The Yankees’ 9-1 loss to the Giants started after a 27-minute delay, and the hypothetical “window” of playable weather never materialized. Marcus Stroman pitched a disastrous two-thirds of an inning before handing it over to the bullpen and, at that point, it just seemed like a slow march to an official game.

But it was a very slow march, and a very quick turn from potentially playable to potentially disastrous.

Bench coach Brad “Ausmus and I were just talking, and that was probably the worst conditions we’ve ever experienced, and we’ve been doing this for a long time,” Boone said. (For those doing the math, combined, that’s over a half-century of major-league baseball.)

As Yankees pitchers labored, the rain became more incessant, and by the fifth, command started to go by the wayside. Certainly, though, saner minds would prevail once it was an official game. Certainly, the umpires would assess the weather and the score (8-1 at that point) and call it a night. And certainly, everyone knows that rain does this weird thing where it accumulates — which means that even though it may be raining at the same rate it was coming down an hour ago, the field conditions and grip get progressively worse.

Instead, in the sixth, we got to witness the ritual sacrifice of Yoendrys Gomez, who didn’t look as if he had a good feel for the ball, bad weather or not. That’s not the issue, though. No, it was the fact that Gomez looked to be in real danger of hurting an opposing batter — walking three straight and nearly hitting all three.

At that point, Boone went out to the mound, both to check on his pitcher, who was experiencing a downtick in velocity, but also to speak to the umpires.

Even he — the literal manager of the New York Yankees — didn’t seem to understand why those same Yankees couldn’t just take their “L’’ and go home. Gomez got the next two outs and walked another batter, forcing home a run, before Boone made yet another trek, his face a mixture of befuddlement and exasperation. Behind him, his infield was cast in the bright sheen of dirt caked under a slick layer of water.

“We were having those conversations” about calling the game, Boone said of his sixth-inning talks with the umpiring crew. “I was like, it’s pretty rough out here. My concern [with Gomez] was when the velo really dropped off and then it starts turning into a completely different game.”

The pitches up and in, “that’s not fun,” catcher Austin Wells said. “That’s definitely not something you want to see . . . it wasn’t ideal.”

Finally, with the forecast promising nothing but more rain until Saturday, the umpires asked for the tarp. After the requisite half-hour required by MLB, the game was called.

On the surface, this looks like just one of those bad nights: The Yankees’ struggles on the mound caused innings to go long, the rain never approached torrential, and the umpires were just trying to do their job. But if you look a little deeper, it shows a lack of foresight and common sense.

To start, let’s have a rule refresher: Before a game starts, it’s up to the home team to determine whether the weather is playable. After it begins, it’s up to the discretion of the umpires.

Before the game, Boone said the reports he got indicated that there would be a window of play, and with everyone armed with that knowledge, the game started after a brief delay.

And still, he appeared hesitant. At 5 p.m. he was told that the weather would be OK, with some concern in the later hours. By the time pitchers started warming up a little after 6 p.m., “they said hold on, and there was some pessimistic reports that came in with some optimistic reports that came in,” Boone said. “It was very — a little bit dicey in my eyes.”

He was right. Things never got better, and MLB did a whole lot of nothing for a long time — possibly because it didn’t have a lot of room to work with thanks to some confounding scheduling.

See, the Giants aren’t coming back to New York until they play the Mets in August, and even then, there isn’t an off-day available for them to make a quick trip to the Bronx and make up the game. You read that right: Baseball scheduled a National League West Coast team to make its only trip to the Bronx in April — a month rife with weather-related woes.

Saturday’s weather doesn’t look great, either, so a rainout Friday likely would have made for a doubleheader Sunday — something that does no favors to the Giants, who will travel to Philadelphia for a game Monday.

The result was an (im)perfect storm, but unlike the weather that battered the Bronx Friday night, it was an entirely preventable one.

By Laura Albanese

laura.albanese@newsday.com@AlbaneseLaura

Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.