Quoting Joe Sheehan:
"I discovered yesterday that the Yankees don’t play on Labor Day, which seems silly. Looking deeper, it appears that MLB is continuing to kill the tradition of holiday baseball. There are 11 games on Memorial Day, just five of them in the daytime, one of those in Toronto. Labor Day features 10 games, eight of them during the day.
Everybody plays on July 4, but that’s only because it’s a Friday. Six of those games are scheduled for the daytime, although a handful of others have late-afternoon or early-evening starts, presumably to allow for fireworks.
I’m sure there are reasons for this trend, but you would think that an industry that so desperately tries to connect itself to its past in some ways would embrace the idea of an American pastime on American holidays, baseball in the sunshine on a Monday afternoon as a means of kicking off the summer or ending it."
I realize Monday and Thursday are both frequent travel days for teams, but having that many teams miss a major holiday is outrageous.
(Fun Labor Day schedule quirk: When the A's had their 20-game winning streak in 2002, they began a series against the Royals on Labor Day, but took the Tuesday off.)
Posted by Matt Bruce at April 23, 2008 10:46 AMWas it Labor Day or Memorial Day when you and I went to a day game at Pac Bell and sat behind the girl with Hunter (or was it Forest?) Green underwear?
Posted by: Kubi at April 23, 2008 07:33 PMEven though I had remembered it as Labor Day, it might have actually been Memorial Day: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2000/B05290SFN2000.htm
Posted by: me at April 24, 2008 10:28 AM