What time of day are big baseball matches usually played? Is it always an evening event or are there daytime matches too?
Some daytime, but mostly they’re played at night. First pitch is often 7:00 or 7:30. By 8:00 it’s dark.
Colophon, most games are at night, but usually the last game of a series is held in the afternoon. This helps the other team get an earlier start on its travel to its next destination. See the D’Backs’ August schedule for examples.
As to the weather, Phoenix isn’t at 3k feet, though there are suburbs that are that high. Chase Field is at 1090 feet. It looks to be fairly close to Phoenix’s airport, Sky Harbor International. Here’re the seasonal weather averages and records for Sky Harbor. It gets pretty warm in the summertime, hence the need for the retractable dome.
OTOH, baseball can be played outdoors, in the summer, in the SW U.S. Playing anything outdoors in Las Vegas that doesn’t involve near-constant immersion in water, just gob-smacks me. But they do it.
I’ve got to imagine that high school teams play things like football, soccer, and cross-country in the late summer/early fall in the desert. And they can’t generally afford to do those sports indoors. (Though it wouldn’t surprise me to learn of a Texas H.S. installing a domed stadium.) I want to die just thinking about the idea of double-days in Phoenix sunshine.
Also, the comparison to baseball just doesn’t hold. Baseball doesn’t have nearly the sustained athletic component that soccer does. Even American football doesn’t, but you still routinely (as in every few years) hear stories of those players dying during late-summer pre-season workouts. The closest would probably be hockey and basketball, neither of which are played outdoors.
Humans just can’t handle continuous exertion at those temperatures and not feel the effects.
To say nothing of the fans.
I don’t think anyone is comparing baseball and football. **Colophon **asked a question as to how stadia in desert environs in the USA are set up to deal with the issue of heat. That’s all. No one is making any comparison in effort exerted between the two sports.
Now, now…fans won’t work nearly as well as AC…
Gotcha.
Having sat through (and played in) many baseball games in 95-100F heat (with 70%+ humidity), its certainly playable without any real decline in player performance. It just really, really sucks. I can’t even begin to imagine what a high-level soccer match would look like in those conditions.
Anybody have any idea what the hottest temp for a top-tier or international soccer match was?
The only major pro American sport played outdoors in the summer is baseball. Football starts in September, and basketball and hockey are indoor sports.
The number of “desert” baseball teams is, basically, one; Arizona, and they simply built a stadium with a roof that can be closed on unusually hot days. Problem solved.
Some other southern teams do struggle a but with heat, notably Houston and Texas (Dallas). Houston also has a stadium with a roof. Texas does not, but schedules most of their summer home games at night, even on the weekends, when most teams prefer to play in the afternoon.
Heat CAN be a problem in baseball, contrary to what other posters have suggested, especially for the pitcher. It was even more of a problem with more teams had artificial turf, which has a propensity for making the playing surface unbearably hot, but almost all teams have gotten rid of that now save for two in domed stadia.
Well, there are the minor leagues as well. When I was watching PCL baseball as a kid (before the 1997 expansion) there were teams in Phoenix, Colorado Springs, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Tucson as well as Tacoma, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Calgary. There are plenty of teams in the Southwest and West that are playing in older stadiums without a roof and they schedule a lot of night games as a result.
Pros have preseason games in August, real ones in September. But pros and high schools have real games starting in the last weekend of August - it’s damn hot in Texas and Oklahoma this time of year, especially with afternoon games.
Assuming for one second that this whole idea isn’t total BS and the World Cup location isn’t going to be moved, how the heck do you stage it in the winter? Of the major domestic European leagues, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 are the only two that currently have a winter break long enough to accommodate a World Cup. The EPL has none. Not to mention the clubs will absolutely HATE having all their star players leave, potentially get injured with no time after for recovery, and come back exhausted just in time for the Champions League knockout stages. This will disrupt absolutely everything.
Yes, a winter Wold Cup is a total non-starter.
No offense, but this is kinda silly. Not to get into an argument over what constitutes a “major pro American sport”, but for purposes of a soccer-based discussion about what playing sports in the heat of an American summer is like, shouldn’t we just go with Major League Soccer?
The LA Galaxy, Chivas USA (also in Los Angeles), FC Dallas and the Houston Dynamo are the four teams that play their games in Southern cities, and (at least during the summer months) they play most of their home games at night. Dallas and Houston both, in fact, play a number of games starting as late as 8pm- presumably just to deal with the heat and humidity.
If the World Cup is played in the summer heat of Qatar I honestly think that some spectators (and possibly even players) will die from heat exhaustion. If that happens then IMHO Sepp Blatter and his FIFA cronies should absolutely be put on trial for manslaughter/negligent homicide.
This talk of moving the World Cup from summer to winter only highlights just how corrupt the whole bidding process was. ie Qatar’s whole bid was based on lies and false pretenses.
If you can’t deliver a summer World Cup then don’t bid for a summer World Cup.
My assumption is that any talk of moving the World Cup to winter is just another excuse for Blatter and Co. to accept another round of bribes.
UEFA should squash this stupid idea immediately. Move the 2022 Cup to England or the USA, or rebid it, whatever.
It would seem a decent criteria for future World Cups would be you can only bid to host a World Cup Finals if you’ve had a team, at least once in the history of the event, that was able to qualify for the event.
…by who? Qatar?
There has to be a “While My Qatar Gently Weeps” joke in here somewhere.
I look at you all see the skin there that’s burning
While my Qatar gently weeps
I look at the fans and I see cash needs reaping
Still my Qatar gently weeps
I don’t know why somebody chose you
With your soaring temps
I don’t know how FIFA controlled you
They bought and sold you
I look at the stands and I notice they’re burning
While my Qatar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my Qatar gently weeps
By the country(ies) that have a spectator(s) or athlete(s) die.
Man, it takes some work to make the IOC look classy, but damn if FIFA ain’t giving it the old college try.
We got a preview today…
Ecuador star Christian Benitez dies a day after playing in Qatar heat
This needs to end. Now. It’s not going to get any better. The best they can hope for is that they can move it to November, and nobody wants any part of that, either. People are going to be dropping like flies.