It’s a sunny day out in New York City. After last night’s deluge, the sky is perfectly blue, and the mercury is hovering around 63. It is the perfect day for a Sunday afternoon baseball game. Yet, because of the demands of television, we have to wait. We have to wait until 8:20 p.m. when temperatures will be in the low 50s. The ninth inning should arrive sometime around midnight with a chill in the air.

By now, the Yankees and the Angels must be used to this. The two teams have been playing in extremes — cold and rainy New York, warm and sunny Anaheim. The weather is, of course, just one aspect of postseason baseball. By the time mid-October arrives in the Northeast, it could be chilly and damp or it could be warm and sunny.

Baseball can’t control the weather, but they can control the calendar. It’s time to start rethinking the playoff schedule. When the Yankees and Angels take the field this evening, it will be just the ninth time in 21 days that these two teams play baseball. The Yanks have played games on back-to-back days twice since the regular season ended.

Today, The Times tackles this lack of baseball. The Angels’ manager doesn’t think too highly of this approach to scheduling. “Ridiculous,” Scioscia said. “I don’t know. Can I say it any clearer than that? We should have never had a day off last Wednesday. We should never have three days off after the season. You shouldn’t even have two days off after the season.”

In another piece, Joshua Robinson explores baseball’s reactions and excuses and examines why the World Series is going to end in November. My favorite quotation in that second article comes from Katy Feeney, baseball’s V.P. of scheduling. “If somebody can tell us which week in April or which week in November would be best, we’d be happy to schedule around those, but nobody seems able to quite do that yet,” Feeney said. “Weather people seem to be the only people that can keep their jobs and be wrong most of the time.”

That’s right; a Major League Baseball executive is blaming the meteorologists for baseball’s elongated October scheduling. The reality is much simpler. Baseball is being held hostage to its television deals. Because the networks pay billions of dollars for the TV rights, they want to maximize prime time coverage. Gone are the days when two games are on at once, and mostly gone are the days when two games are played on the same calendar day. With a crazy 2-2-1-2 format for the league championship series, FOX and TBS ensure that most days just feature one baseball game.

For the players, this change is tough. Starters are used to playing 162 games in around 190 days. They play every day every month for six months. And when October arrives, they play now and then.

For the fans, the stop-and-go pace of the postseason is excruciating. Fixing it, though, is easy. Baseball needs to assert a variable schedule about the Division Series. They should ensure that, outside of travel days, the unnecessary off days should be eliminated. The Yanks don’t need to take a day off in New York after Game 1 of the ALDS, and the Angels and Yanks didn’t need to sit around Anaheim on Wednesday while not playing.

Baseball should also start the League Championship Series sooner if the teams are ready. The Angels and Yanks wrapped up their division series on Sunday and didn’t play until Thursday. It would be easy for those two teams to play on Tuesday, and fans would manage.

In the end, this is about the money. Baseball fans wait as baseball and TV executives see the dollars flow in. At some point, it should change. It’s better for the game to let October play out smoothly instead of this as a stop-and-start postseason we are witnessing this year.