Bottom line gets soaked by rainouts

The pain in the voice of Clippers president and general manager Ken Schnacke sounded like a man who just noticed that a stray shopping cart had inflicted some nasty scratches and a big dent on his new car.

Rainouts are part of baseball like a botched double play that leads to a big rally against your team, but losing a Friday night in June at Huntington Park was a kick to the shin.

“This hurts a little bit,” Schnacke said of a postponement against Toledo. “We were (hoping) to have a big crowd with good weather.”

How much money did the club lose?

“It’s too much — too much,” he said.

The game against the Mud Hens will be made up as part of a doubleheader at 5:35 p.m. on Aug. 5.

Another point of frustration is the club lost a home date when the final game of a series against Scranton/Wilkes-Barre was dashed by rain on May 25. Because the RailRiders were not returning to Columbus, the makeup game was played in their ballpark on May 31.

It might not seem that one game is much, but consider the International League schedule has been trimmed to 142 games from 144 this season. Next season, there will be 140 games.

“The ideology is that the players need more days off,” Schnacke said. “This year, we’ve got 153 days to play 142 games. No team has lost a weekend game with this schedule. Everyone lost one weekday game the first half of the season and one in the second half.”

Columbus ranks second behind Charlotte in the IL in attendance at 294,243 for 34 dates, for an average crowd of 8,654. The Knights have drawn 294,805 in 33 dates (8,933).

The Clippers are on pace to attract more than 600,000 fans for the ninth straight season, or as long as Huntington Park has been open.

Schnacke and his staff decided to call the game at 4:30 p.m.

“When we do something like this we monitor the suite orders and parties, and we saw that this was going to be a struggle to get a good crowd because of the weather,” he said. “The field took so much water and there was a good two hours of work to get it ready for a game. That meant a starting time of 8:00 or 8:30, and that’s getting too late.”

Groundskeeper Wes Ganobcik and Schnacke followed The Weather Channel and weather apps on their phones.

“You look at currents and visualize where a front is heading,” Schnacke said. “Sometimes you roll the dice and hang on to the game because you have a chance. But 4:30 is the point of no return to make a decision. The concession stands are going to start preparing food and the part-time employees start to arrive at the park. You think of the fans.”