For opening day, Phillies looking lucky, at least weather-wise. Then again, March 28 is a special day.

On the day the Phillies will play their earliest home game ever, they appear likely to get a huge break with the weather. And historically, the team couldn't have picked a better day.

A military fly-over before opening day at Citizens Bank Park in 2016. The sky should look similar for the Phillies' home opener on Thursday.Read more--- Steven M. Falk / File Photograph

by Anthony R. Wood

Updated Mar. 28, 2019, 7:33 a.m. ET

Published Mar. 27, 2019, 6:04 a.m. ET

One of the oldest franchises in professional sports, your Philadelphia Phillies, will make history when they host the Atlanta Braves on Thursday on a date that holds a peculiar place in the city’s weather history.

Never have the Phillies played a real game so early in the season, as the schedule-makers have made a major wager on nature. Playing baseball in late March in the Northeast is in a league with risking a World Series game in late October; those are the bookends of the cool season when the atmosphere is prone to riot.

Early-season winter-wonderland scenes from baseball parks aren’t at all unusual. Just last year, the Yankees’ opener in New York was snowed out, and in 1907, the old New York Giants had to forfeit a game to the Phillies, after which, a snowball fight broke out.

But the schedule-makers are going to win their gamble Thursday. “It should be a beautiful day,” said Valerie Meola, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, with a decent, hitter-friendly breeze, around 10 mph, blowing out to center field, and temperatures near 60.

To what do the Phillies owe such luck? Perhaps it all has something to do with it being March 28.

Since Philadelphia began keeping official snow records in the winter of 1884-85 (coincidentally the year after the Phillies were born), measurable snow has fallen officially in Philadelphia on every day from Nov. 19 through April 16 — with one exception. That would be March 28.

On April 1, 1924, 6.6 inches fell officially in Philadelphia, and 19 inches on April 3, 1915 (the Phillies’ seasons had not started yet).

What explains such an anomaly? Therein lies a lesson in the limits of climate records. Philadelphia’s record is among the oldest in the nation, but in climatological time, it is still a toddler.

“It’s quite a small period,” Meola said. Give it a few hundred more years, and odds are overwhelming that measurable snow will land in Philadelphia on a March 28.

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Meola says she’s sure that it had happened before 1885, and in all likelihood it had, eight years earlier.

We were not publishing during the ice ages, but the March 29, 1877, Inquirer did carry a report from the U.S. Signal Service, a predecessor to the National Weather Service, that snow fell for several hours between 7 a.m. and 4:42 p.m. on March 28. Temperatures during that afternoon were below freezing.

Neither the Phillies nor Braves nor the fans will see any snowflakes during this series — temperatures are forecast to soar into the low-70s on Saturday and near 60 on Sunday, when they might see raindrops.