Money, not weather, drives MLB's wacky April sked

	Jacobs Field was in no condition for baseball last weekend. AP
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Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter has an idea that seems to make sense, especially after a trying first week in baseball in which the Indians had seven games either snowed out or relocated to a different time zone, stars such as Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui and Victor Martinez were hurt trying to play baseball in football weather, and fans, when they bothered to show up at all, sat through miserable conditions to watch something that did not pass for major league-quality baseball.

"I'd gladly open in domes or on the West Coast every year," Jeter said. "I don't consider it a disadvantage. The [second] game [against Tampa Bay] was the coldest I've ever played baseball in -- not even high school baseball in Michigan. We never started this early."

But if you think the chill of the opening week in the baseball season will prompt baseball to re-address its schedule, forget it. Commissioner Bud Selig basically has chalked it up to bad luck and foresees no changes.

"That's absolutely correct,'' he told me Monday. "I've been through [the schedule issue] just about my entire adult life, since 1970. The more you tamper with the schedule, the more problems it creates."

Yes, baseball got unlucky with the cold snap that hit much of the country, even Atlanta. And it's doing the right thing -- at the Indians' request, mind you -- to move Cleveland's home games against Los Angeles to Milwaukee. It's making the best out of bad situation, particularly because Indians owner Paul Dolan expressed concern that his field would be unplayable, which would have meant seven rescheduled games for Cleveland to shoehorn into its season, a near impossibility.

But why are cold weather teams (Detroit, New York) hosting dome teams (Toronto, Tampa Bay) for the first series of the year? Why does a team (Seattle) make its only trip of the season to a cold weather city (Cleveland) in the first week of the season? Why are two dome teams playing one another (Toronto, Tampa Bay) on the first weekend?

I know that putting together a schedule is a terribly complex job, especially with interleague play gumming up the works. But the bottom line is that every year the owners would rather roll the dice and subject their millionaire players to hazardous conditions (forget about your comfort, which they did long ago) than surrender the chance to make a few more bucks.

Here's what Selig said when I suggested West Coast teams always open at home: "I just talked to Sandy Alderson, who as you know is with the Padres. And he said he doesn't want to be loaded up with April games and have fewer games in the summer." The summer games, when school is out and people are vacationing, draw better.

And here's the other complaint Selig said he gets from owners: "The two-team markets tell me they absolutely do not want to be at home at the same time under any circumstance." Again, it's more about squeezing every last dollar than it is about common sense.