Baltusrol washout was very avoidable

SPRINGFIELD, N.J. — Weather technology is pretty advanced these days, you might have noticed. Radar being what it is, right there on your phone, nobody paying attention gets caught in the rain without an umbrella anymore. So how did the folks running the PGA Championship get all wet on Saturday?

Everyone knew that heavy rain was coming in the afternoon, and when the PGA Tour gets such a forecast for any regular tournament, it routinely moves tee times up hours ahead of normal to avoid the type of wipeout day we got at the PGA Championship here at Baltusrol.

Play wasn’t stopped until 2:14 p.m., which means that if players had been sent out in threesomes, using the split-tee format of the first two rounds, the leaders probably could have gotten much of their rounds in on Saturday. Meaning that a Sunday finish still would have been possible, if the weather cooperates.

Instead this tournament seems headed for a Monday finish, which typically makes for quite a buzzkill, even for one of golf’s majors.

However, on Saturday night, Kerry Haigh, the PGA’s chief championships officer, was making the case that a Sunday finish could still be accomplished.

“If Mother Nature cooperates,” he said, “hopefully we’ll be crowning a champion tomorrow night.”

That is a best-case scenario that includes not only perfect weather but Haigh’s estimate that players will complete their rounds in four hours, which almost never happens in a major tournament.

And oh, by the way, the forecast calls for more rain on Sunday. In other words, don’t bet on it.

But even if Haigh gets his best-case scenario, the attempt now to push for a Sunday night finish means the PGA has scheduled the final round to begin at 8:40 a.m., less than two hours after all players are in position to complete the third round at 7 a.m.

That means golfers will not be re-paired, according to score, and someone like Kevin Kisner, who is currently in sixth place after a 65 in the third round, will complete his tournament more than four hours before the final twosome of Jimmy Walker and Robert Streb — Saturday’s leaders who never teed off.

Suffice to say this all would have been a lot simpler had the PGA moved up Saturday’s tee times in anticipation of the afternoon rain.

However, Kaigh maintained that the forecast called only for “summer showers,” similar to Thursday and Friday, and the PGA, hoping for the best, wanted to avoid using split tees.

“It’s a major championship,” he said. “We want it to be run as a major championship.”

They also want live golf on TV in the afternoon, as CBS would rather not have to show tape-delayed action during its window of coverage, and the influence of TV can never be discounted in these situations.

In any case, this hasn’t been the best year for golf’s governing bodies. The USGA made an embarrassingly bad decision during the final round of the U.S. Open to delay a penaltyruling decision on Dustin Johnson until after he completed play, and was spared complete chaos only because Johnson pulled away to win easily.

This certainly doesn’t rise to that level of foolishness. Still, most forecasts for Saturday called for more certainty regarding thunderstorms and heavy rain than Haigh made it sound. Moving up tee times would have made sure the leaders played enough golf to allow for a re-pairing of players after Round 3 and better chance of a Sunday finish.

Instead we might get a repeat of sorts of the 2005 PGA Championship here at Baltusrol, when Phil Mickelson birdied the 18th hole to win the second major of his career.

That finish was dramatic but, as always on a Monday, it felt anti-climactic, with a relatively small crowd on the grounds and none of the usual Sunday build-up.

Unfortunately for Mickelson, who barely made the cut this year and played early on Saturday, beating the rain won’t be a factor at the finish this time.

The tournament could use his star presence, now more than ever, but even after a 68 on Saturday, Mickelson is eight shots behind the leaders on a rain-softened golf course that is sure to yield lower-than-normal scores over the final two rounds.

At least Jason Day, the No. 1-ranked player in the world, is sitting in a tie for third place, two strokes behind co-leaders Walker and Streb. Otherwise British Open winner Henrik

OStenson is the biggest name near the top. f course, a close finish involving multiple players always makes for great theater at a major, so anything is possible. Mickelson even predicted that with the wet conditions, someone very well could shoot the first 62 in a major.

That would be memorable. Let’s just hope it happens on Sunday when people are here to see it.