Any good scandal in Major League Baseball — take your pick, there have been plenty — starts with a handful of teams and/or players cheating or at least bending the rules.
Performance-enhancing drugs? Players didn't decide as one big group to start bulking up. The masses likely saw the impact on the few, and an epidemic was born.
Cheating to steal signs, like the Astros were famously caught doing? Surely teams saw the benefit and figured, if Houston is winning and getting away with it, why shouldn't we.
Doctoring up the baseball with more than just stuff to get a better grip? Same story.
I don't have evidence that we just witnessed another incarnation of this over the last few days, but those who follow the game even more closely than I do are in agreement: the Twins' weather postponement on Saturday at Target Field, followed by Monday's postponement of Monday's Twins game at Chicago, were both at least fishy.
Former Twins beat writer turned columnist La Velle E. Neal III used the term "flimsy evidence" to describe the Twins' "rainout" on Saturday and argued that both the Twins and two days later the White Sox used the threat of rain as a means to call of games and get a day of much-needed rest.
As I noted on Tuesday's Daily Delivery podcast, this is problematic on a number of levels. It's disrespectful to fans who show up thinking a game at least might be played. It manipulates the rules in an unfair way. And even if the concern about rain is genuine, it is part of a larger societal ill that places too much emphasis on the slim chances of bad things happening instead of trying and adjusting.
But there's also an easy fix to this particular baseball problem.
