Rain, rain has gone away, but some still can’t play as fields drain from Opening Week deluge

There’s the official start of Spring, which was back on March 19th this year. But for many, Spring doesn’t start until baseball does.

For high school baseball, that means April first this year.

But as of after three days of rain, many teams haven’t opened yet. And for a sport that many coaches bemoan has too short a preseason and too condensed a regular season, that’s going to cause some problems.

Before any teams got in games Thursday morning – if they were lucky enough to have turf or a grass field that drains really well – of the 33 baseball teams in the Greater Middlesex Conference, only four of them had managed just one game: JFK, JP Stevens, North Plainfield and Old Bridge.

In the Skyland, out of 14 Somerset County teams, only six have gotten to play yet, including Bound Brook, Bridgewater-Raritan, Franklin, Gill St. Bernard’s Hillsborough and Montgomery all getting one game in through the first three days of the season.

As things began to dry out Thursday, more teams took the field for the first time, while Hillsborough actually got in its second game.

Things weren’t so lucky for Monroe, which had to reschedule its Thursday GMC Red Division home game against St. Joseph for April 26th. Their Friday game in Metuchen has been moved to later in the afternoon up at Cranford, on turf.

Many grass fields were probably well waterlogged before Opening Day, with this week’s rain just piling on.

The Rutgers Gardens weather station in New Brunswick gives us some pretty interesting numbers:

• In the first three days of April, we’ve received 3.12 inches of precipitation. The entire month got 5.76 inches of precip in 2023, with 1.44 inches falling on Saturday, April 22nd, wiping out the late games of the Autism Awareness Challenge in North Brunswick, and moving most of Sunday’s games elsewhere.
• March saw 7.83 inches of precipitation (rain and melted snow) this year, when last year saw just 3.64.
• Year-to-date, we have had 19.27 inches of precipitation through 7 am, April 4th of this year. Last year that total was 11.32. That’s almost double.

And don’t forget how rainy the fall was. The final four months of the year – September through December – saw 25.11 inches of precipitation this past year, while the fall/early winter of 2022 had just 16.21 inches. That year was more balanced, though. In 2023, we had almost 11 inches of rain in September, and 8.77 inches of precipitation in December.

It all adds up to some pretty water-logged grass fields – a good advertisement for turf! – meaning it won’t take much to make fields unplayable the rest of the Spring season.