EDITORIAL Rain rule washes Waynesburg out of baseball playoffs

Waynesburg already had a rain day. It’s July 29, a date that – according to legend and tradition – at least a drop of precipitation has fallen onto the borough for an inordinate number of years. There is an annual Rain Day Festival replete with a Miss Rain Day Pageant.
A more notorious rain day occurred Wednesday, and while it happened many miles to the north, the weather had a profound effect on Waynesburg and its high school baseball team and fans. And no one from Central Greene was celebrating this cloudburst.
The Raiders competed in the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL) playoffs that afternoon. Officially, they lost to Shady Side Academy, 6-5, in a first-round Class 3A matchup at Peters Township’s Peterswood Park. In reality, they were done in by a heavy storm and a heavy-handed rule.
Waynesburg Central High fell behind, 6-0, after only two innings, but mounted a rally. The Raiders scored once in the third, once in the fourth and three times in the bottom of the fifth to draw to within 6-5 and wrest momentum from Shady Side.
But as the Indians prepared to bat in the top of the sixth, the heavens opened and the field was drenched. Following an hour delay, and with liquid sunshine still cascading down, the umpires properly halted the contest.
High school games in Pennsylvania last seven innings, and because five full innings had been played, this was an “official” game. That meant the team with the lead at that juncture was the winner. The five-inning “rain rule” applies at most levels of baseball, including the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (PIAA), which governs high school sports in the commonwealth.
After the inevitable decision was made, home-plate umpire Mitchell Levenson told the Observer-Reporter’s Luke Campbell: “The field is cooked. It’s completely finished … We would love to get (the game) in, but it’s not worth the safety of the kids. By the time (the rain) stops, there wouldn’t be anything that anyone could do to fix the field.”
Waynesburg’s first-year coach, Jamie Moore, may have been as upset about the rule as he was about losing. “It’s a bad rule,” he said. “I think a playoff game you finish. We had all the momentum and aren’t allowed to finish? I think it’s a bad rule.”
We concur – in postseason situations. The five-inning rule should be applied during the regular season, when so many games are contested and the stakes are not so high. If not, considering the wet local climate, makeup games could force the scholastic season to end in mid-June, following commencement.
But with so much riding in postseason play, we believe that all playoff games should last the requisite seven innings – unless extra innings are required, of course. The Waynesburg-Shady Side Academy matchup should have been suspended Wednesday, picked up a day or two later at a neutral venue, and at the point at which the game was stopped – with the Indians batting in the top of the sixth.
You want to determine true WPIAL and PIAA champions? Leave that to the players. Let them complete the high-stakes games they started.
The Raiders did not get that opportunity.