Cubs, Indians Rained Out; Makeup Date August 24

Well, that was an interesting afternoon and early evening.

You know, I can understand what Cubs officials were thinking. The Cubs and Indians have just one common off day the rest of this year, and early this afternoon it appeared from some radar images that the storms would go both south and north of the city of Chicago but perhaps leave the proverbial "window" to play.

So I left for Wrigley Field at my usual time; it wasn't raining and in fact, there were a few peeks of sun.

By 4:30, though, it had started to rain, lightly at first, then more insistently, and there were only about 30 or 40 people waiting for the bleacher gates to open. Cubs employees were nice enough to let us stand right inside the gates, underneath the overhang, as the rain started falling harder.

At 5:00 they scanned us all in. It couldn't have been more than a couple of minutes later that the tornado sirens went off. They're loud, in case you've never heard them before. If you've ever seen the pole on Waveland that looks like it has some white auto tires on the top of it -- that's the tornado sirens. Here's why that happened:

Tornado Warning including Berwyn IL, Bellwood IL, Brookfield IL until 5:15 PM CDT pic.twitter.com/WeDSBSODR5

— NWS Chicago (@NWSChicago) June 15, 2015

The movement of the storm, as you can see in that graphic, was away from the north side of Chicago, but apparently that's close enough to make the sirens go off. The last time tornado sirens went off at Wrigley was August 4, 2008, when the Astros were in town. You might remember that as the day that Lance Berkman raced into the dugout because he was afraid of a bolt of lightning.

The weather was severe enough to prompt this tweet from Jordan Bastian, who is the Indians' MLB.com beat writer:

This is a first: raining so hard they won't let media to press box at Wrigley. Francona said it'll likely be split DH if washed out tonight.

— Jordan Bastian (@MLBastian) June 15, 2015

Obviously, Terry Francona was just speculating and that's not going to happen. The Cubs announced by press release that the game will be made up Monday, August 24, time TBD. The Cubs will be finishing up a six-game homestand against the Tigers and Braves and then will be heading to the West Coast; the Indians will be wrapping up a 10-game road trip to Minnesota, Boston and New York. I'd guess that might make this one a 1:20 start, so both teams can get out of town, or maybe 3:05, though they do have the right to make it up as a night game if they so choose.

It's tough to find dates like this with the interleague schedule and the Tribe in Chicago for only two days. August 24 is literally the only common off day the two teams had for the rest of this year.

About 5:30 the supervisors in the bleachers gave the all-clear and the 50 or so of us who had shown up for the game (in the bleachers, anyway; I don't know how many came to the other side of the park) departed into some moderate rain.

This will make the task of the Wrigleyville bar owners much easier tonight as they probably will still have large crowds watching the Blackhawks game; there won't be a crowd coming out of Wrigley Field at about the same time the hockey game is scheduled to end.

Tonight's scheduled pitching matchup will be held over; Jake Arrieta will pitch against Trevor Bauer. Everyone else in the rotation also gets pushed back a day.

Feel free to use this thread as a game thread for Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final. I'll be watching. Go Blackhawks!