Lord, send snow to Denver

I’d like clergymen throughout the nation to join me in this prayer. It should be recited by 5:30 PDT this evening, when the World Series moves from Boston to Denver:

Lord, in the name of all that is generous and all that looks coldly upon greed, please let there be snow in Denver for the next 14 days. Let your wrath take the form of tiny, angry darts of white flakes that shall paralyze the World Series.

Lord, I know you resent and dismiss the prayers of one-issue brokers. But Major League Baseball needs to be taught a lesson.

It needs to be taught that to play a 162-game schedule and two rounds of playoffs before starting the World Series in late October is greedy.

It needs to be punished, also, for eliminating daytime World Series games, slavishly soliciting more advertising dollars by starting the games at 8:30 p.m. on the East Coast. In baseball, as in education, no child should be left behind.

Lord, let there be snow in Denver. Let adversity from the heavens plant the seed of compassion in Major League Baseball. The indignity of having the World Series frozen -- of being unable to play games 3 and 4 (and 5 if needed) in Denver -- will embarrass some of the owners, who will say: “This should never happen again. We should return to the 154-game schedule that baseball enjoyed until the expansion of the early 1960s.”

Lord, let this companion pledge of righteousness penetrate those hardened owners’ skulls. Let them proclaim: “We will cut the length of the playoffs: best of three games, rather than five, for the divisional series, and best of five, rather than seven, for the league championship series that determines who goes to the World Series.”

Lord, let these conversations burst like sunflowers in the snow of Denver, snow so massive by your hand that Major League Baseball will shift the games to Phoenix after the fourth consecutive white-out. And then, Lord, call out the new, 11th Commandment:

“Thou shall not play a World Series game later than Oct. 7.”

Bob Baker, a former Times reporter and editor, is a freelance writer.