The Pirates are having a weird and busy week
The complexities of baseball scheduling are incredible. Every team has to play 162 games, but 81 of them have to be played at a team’s home stadium. There’s division play, non-division play, concerns about days off, travel times, the locations of road trips, and there’s interleague play, too. It’s insane.
When the season starts, the schedule is as good as it can get. But when teams start adding postponements and makeup games into the mix, schedules can get crazy and weird. The Pittsburgh Pirates have been dealing with just that situation this week.
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You can watch the Pirates try to handle the most difficult part of their weird schedule when they take on the Colorado Rockies in Denver today, and you can watch it for free! Why? It’s Yahoo Sports’ MLB Free Game of the Day, of course! First pitch is at 5:10 p.m. ET, and you can stream the game for free on Yahoo’s Sports Home, MLB index and video home. Local blackouts apply, per MLB rules.
This all started back on April 28, when a delightful combo of rain, sleet, and snow postponed the finale of the Pirates-Rockies four-game series at Coors Field. The game was rescheduled for five weeks in the future, June 9.
Fast forward to Tuesday, June 7, just two days ago. The Pirates were facing the New York Mets in Pittsburgh, and their game on June 6 was postponed due to rain. So they played a doubleheader on June 7: 8 1/2 innings in one game, and 8 1/2 innings in the second, for a grand total of 17 innings in one day.
The Pirates had to face the Mets on Wednesday at 7:10 p.m. to wrap up the series, and then jet off to Colorado to make up the postponed game from April 28. So of course the game against the Mets was long. It lasted 10 innings and three hours and 51 minutes, finally concluding around 11:00 p.m. ET. Everyone on the Pirates probably wanted to go home and sleep in their own beds, but they had a date in Colorado.
And that’s not all! They’re playing just one game in Denver, and their series over the weekend is back in Pittsburgh. So the Pirates played 17 innings on Tuesday, 10 innings on Wednesday, they jumped on a flight to Denver to play nine innings with the Rockies (at 3:10 p.m. local time), and then they’ll get right back on the plane and head home to Pittsburgh again to take on the St. Louis Cardinals for three games.
That sounds exhausting. The schedule of a baseball player is grueling as it is, and adding in those extra plane trips (not to mention the doubleheader and the extra innings) can’t make it easier. But there’s no rest for the weary, or for the Pirates, it seems.
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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at [email protected] or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher
