You don’t have to be Al Roker to realize the weather here in Western Pennsylvania stinks in the spring.

It’s been particularly poor this year. If April showers do indeed bring May flowers, we’re going to be waist deep in petunias come Cinco de Mayo.

The rain, hail, snow, sleet, snain (is that even a meteorological term? In Butler, it should be) that has been dumped from the heavens on us has led to a slew of baseball and softball cancellations in this area.

Coaches and players are getting stir crazy. You can only take grounders on a gym floor for so long before the absurdity of it becomes too much to bear.

I have never seen an infield in all my life made of parquet.

But such is life in the variable weather of Butler County.

Sometimes, spring is dry and warm and teams have no trouble getting scheduled games played.

Then, you have a spring like this one.

Lucky for us we have a place like Pullman Park nestled in the middle of our city. With its artificial turf infield, games have been played there at a steady rate.

If it were not for Pullman Park, 95 percent of the high school baseball games scheduled by local teams this spring would not have been played.

Knoch has been able to get in a couple of games there. So has Moniteau. Karns City played there Tuesday night and even West Shamokin has played there.

Granted, playing baseball in sub-40 degree weather is not ideal, but at least they are playing.

The same can’t been said for softball teams.

Moniteau has yet to play a game. Neither has A-C Valley.

Butler has played one game. So has Seneca Valley, Karns City and Knoch.

It’s April 7. The season is already three weeks old and teams are four to five games behind schedule.

The solution? Well, there really is no solution other than constructing a large domed stadium or speeding up global warming by giving everyone an aerosol can and going to town.

The schools, districts or even the PIAA could simply move the start of the season back to mid-April and schedule more games per week.

But as anyone who has lived in this part of the country for any length of time knows, that is no guarantee.

Sometimes the weather is better in mid-to-late March than it is in April.

Another solution, at least for the softball dilemma, was talked about several years ago. The proposal was to play the high school softball season in the fall and the girls soccer season in the spring.

The rationalization was the weather in the fall is better suited for softball and soccer can be played in all sorts of nasty weather in the spring.

But that idea fizzled and died. Perhaps it is time to resurrect it.

Thanks to Pullman Park, the baseball problem is mitigated a bit.

Here’s hoping fly balls will soon be falling from the sky instead of all sorts of precipitation.

Mike Kilroy is a staff writer for the Butler Eagle.