It seems to me that wet weather would have a much bigger influence on football, yet football games go on no matter what the weather is like (with a few exceptions). So why do they call a baseball game when the rain, it seems, would have a much less serious effect?
“My hovercraft is full of eels.”
I’ll attempt to bullshit through an answer. In football, if it’s raining each team is at an equal disadvantage. They both have to slog through it. However, in baseball rain gives the advantage to whomever is up to bat at the moment. The ball is harder to pitch accurately when wet, ground balls move slower on a wet field, and the defenders are more prone to slipping. So you have an increased risk of walks, errors, and injuries.
Though come to think of it, the batting team would have some disadvantages as well. It’s hard to watch the pitch coming towards you in the rain and it’s harder to hit the ball if it’s soak with water.
Frankly, playing baseball in the rain just sucks. Playing football in the rain is fun. The whole point of football is muddy, messy, wild play and rain can add to that.
You don’t play baseball in the rain because you can’t.
The primary reason is that the field becomes unplayable very quickly. If you start getting puddles on the infield, the ball won’t roll on the ground and you’ve got a mess on your hands.
You also have problems with pitchers and fielders not being able to grip the ball to make their pitches or throws and the batters will have a hard time holding on to the bat (although they fare better because they can use pine tar).
You also have a problem with rain creating vision problems. This makes it more likely for someone to take a fastball to head, which is not fun.
Overall, baseball in the rain is not baseball. It’s a farce.
Baseball isn’t played in the rain because there is a correlation between rain and hang-nails. If 10 players from one baseball team got hangs-nails, they’d have to be put on IR for 2-3 weeks. No baseball team is willing to go through that.
“And so he says to me, I don’t like the cut of your jib. And I go, I says, but it’s the only jib I’ve got baby.”
Baseball games are stopped mostly because of mud. Notice that when a game is just delayed, not stopped, they cover the dirt in the infield with tarp… they dont cover the outfield. When the rain stops and they continue to play, (if they continue) they dont care so much about grass being wet, just the dirt. No one wants to slide thru mud when they steal second base, 
i’d venture that it also has something to do with the fact that there will likely be another game on that same field the next day. in football, the field has at least a week to recover from being torn up.
-ellis
Football games are occasionally called on account of the weather (Miami of Florida has had one in each of the past two years, as did, most famously last year, ECU) but with no where near the frequency of baseball games, the main reason’s have been listed already, notwithstanding the fact that a football is easier to grip when wet than a baseball (But by no means easier to grip than a dry football). Pitching a wet baseball is like pitching a perfectly round chunk of ice.
slaveone is correct.
Football and soccer involve grass to play on. You can play on it all day, and even if you rip it up an it becomes dirt, that’s not the point.
Baseball and golf involve dirt. Well, sand in gold. This substance gets clumped up, changes the whole game, and thus necessitates the calling of he game.
Yer pal,
Satan
http://www.raleighmusic.com/board/Images/devil.gif
Still not smoking, but away from my meter!
I think that the stoppage due to rain is directly related to not allowing pitchers to throw spitballs.
The pitcher gets a tremendous advantage when throwing a wet ball because it can break much more suddenly and is hard to predict for hitting purposes.
By the same token, the ball is very very hard to control in the sense of not hitting a batter smack dab in the head. Thus, it is very dangerous. Also, a muddier batter’s box would be harder to move in quickly, increasing the danger.
Those are my bets.
Bucky
To clarify something said earlier: football games (including the college ranks) are sometimes stopped because of the weather. However, no NFL football game has ever been called off because of the weather.
That said, there have been NFL games delayed because of weather. Jets/Colts (IIRC) a few years ago at Giant Stadium was suspended for about a half an hour because of rain, high winds, sleet and lightning that threatened to hit the light towers.
It was the first game of the season. The Jets lost. They went 1-15 that year. We should have known.
NFL games will be delayed if the rain is severe, like a hurricane or a powerful thunderstorm.
This is all for safety reasons. Nobody really wants to get struck down by lightning.
However, they still play football in extreme cold (the Chargers-Bengals AFC championship game comes to mind, it was colder than the fabled “Ice Bowl” of Green Bay IIRC).
I wonder if the NFL has any backup plan to make up a game that can’t be played in a city for some reason (hurricane, earthquake). It’s not like they can schedule a doubleheader.
I think it’s much simpler:
Because that’s the way it’s always been.
While I’m not sure about any regular season NFL games, at least one preseason game has been called off. The 1980 Hall of Fame game between the Chargers and the Packers was called with 5:29 left in the fourth quarter because of a severe storm. I’m glad they cared about the players’ safety, though us unfortunate fans were left to our own devices.
Of course this was only a preseason game, so it really didn’t mean anything.
Baseball players and fans are smart enough to come in out of the rain. Baseball is primarily a summer sport that is played every day, and if it rains today they can play a doubleheader tomorrow to make it up.
Football is played in the fall and winter when inclement weather is a lot more likely and so it is just played through.
stoli
“There’s always a little dirt, or infinity, or something.” -Feynman
And if they have to, they will wait a long time to play a baseball game. Last season, the Reds and Brewers played the regularly scheduled game of the 1999 season several hours after its scheduled starting time. They had to wait because the game was going to decide the last playoff spot. There wouldn’t have been any other days to make it up, so they waited … and waited … and waited … and waited.
And they had to wait in County Stadium to boot, not a place known for its commodious facilities.