Inclement weather – or a lousy spring – impacts MLB games, farmers
CHICAGO -- If you've been to a Major League Baseball game in an open-air stadium this year, congratulations. Many of you have lived through some of the coldest temperatures to grace the diamond since records were first kept in 1871. It's what baseball delicately calls "inclement weather," and what the rest of us call a lousy spring, reports CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds.
Snowfalls and wind chills are now part of the big league lexicon along with runs, hits and errors. There have been a record 28 April MLB postponements from rain and snow so far. It's spring – even though fans are fit for polar expeditions. Minneapolis could have had a winter carnival for the last month.
If you have to lay blame, try the jet stream, which plummeted much lower and stayed longer than usual across the region. But the wintry grip may be loosening.
CBS News spoke with Jamie Enderlen of the National Weather Service alongside the facility's still-standing snow fence.
"So does it look like we're finally done?" Reynolds asked.
"It looks like for the next seven days we don't have any snow here in Chicago land," Enderlen said.
Warm weather would be welcome down on the farm. Corn planting hasn't even begun yet in eight states – Ohio, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – where it was well underway a year ago, according to the USDA.
In Illinois, Bob Bleuer and his son, Jeff, are two weeks late getting to his frigid 1,800 acres.
"The soil temperature's not warm enough," Jeff said. The ground thermometer was stuck in the 30s last week, 20 degrees below what a seed needs.
Over the years, we've been with Bob and his family through droughts and floods. Now, it's the cold.
"We just got to deal with Mother Nature on a day to day basis," Bleuer said.
The Cubs are set to play at Wrigley Field this weekend, and it's supposed to be cold with a chance of rain, but no forecast of snow. Next week, it'll be May – and surely it won't snow in May, right?