Baseball and Global Warming

By Thomas Gangale
California Progress Report
Oakland, California
29 October 2007

With the long, long baseball season finally over, I now reflect on a visit to Washington, DC a while back. I stayed with an old flying buddy who is an Air Force Academy graduate, has a strategic planning job as a GS-14, and holds the rank of full-bird colonel in the West Virginia Air National Guard. After an afternoon of walking the Manassas battlefield in the sweltering Virginia summer, we talked about Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and global warming over an Italian dinner.

"It's not greenhouse gases," Mike said in a matter of fact manner, "It's baseball."

It was only due to my military training that I avoided spewing cabernet all over the good colonel. "Baseball?"

"Baseball. Nature is a baseball fan. She's warming up the planet so that more baseball can be played in more places and for longer seasons."

Needless to say, I was skeptical, but as we explored Mike's theory, I saw that the logic was inescapable.

"In temperate climates, baseball is played from spring to autumn, but not in winter. But, look where the winter leagues are... in the tropics: Mexico and the Caribbean. It's warmer there. And where are all of the spring training camps? Arizona and Florida. Hot there, right?"

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