Despite the rain, a Fenway Park maintenance man cleans the bleacher aisles with a power washer. Yesterday’s game against the Angels was postponed.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

BOSTON — The baseball season is two weeks old today, and already the Red Sox have lost two home games to bad weather with the possibility of a third this morning.

As makeup games get backed up like planes in a holding pattern circling Logan Airport, what to do?

“There’s not much we can do,” said Mike Dee, the Red Sox chief operating officer yesterday, hours after the Red Sox-Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim was lost to rain. “It’s difficult — with the unbalanced schedule the 16/14 (16 teams in the National League and 14 in the American) split. It’s very difficult to find ways to circumvent the weather.”

Yesterday’s rainout was the second in four days for the Sox on this, their first home stand of the 2007 season. This morning’s Patriots Day contest with the Angels, slated for a 10 a.m. start, is in jeopardy, but after consultation yesterday, the team elected not to push back the scheduled start time. The team is hopeful that a window will exist in late morning to permit an official game being played.

Last Thursday’s rainout with Seattle will be made up on a mutual off day — May 3 — for the Red Sox and Mariners. Yesterday’s rainout will probably be made up as part of a day-night doubleheader when the Angels return to Boston on mid-August, but the rescheduling hadn’t been made official of last night.

Even with two postponements in the first six home games, the Red Sox haven’t been as disrupted as the Cleveland Indians, who lost an entire four-game series with the Mariners last week and had another three-game set with the Angels moved to Milwaukee’s Miller Park, a neutral site, which features a retractable roof.

One change Major League Baseball will be attempting to implement is to make sure that early-season series with out-of-division opponents be played against teams in the same general geographic area.

In the future, that would mean fewer April series for the Red Sox against clubs like Seattle and Los Angeles, and more with, say, Detroit and Cleveland, since in the event games need to be rescheduled later in the season, the return travel would be far shorter.

(Thanks to baseball’s unbalanced schedule, opponents from within the same league but in different divisions often make just one trip to a city each season. Seattle, for instance, wasn’t scheduled to return to Boston again this year, hence the need for the common off-day for the makeup. Los Angeles, meanwhile, returns to Fenway from Aug. 17-19, making rescheduling somewhat easier in the form of day-night doubleheaders).

Baseball’s master schedule is overseen by Katy Feeney, senior vice president of club relations and scheduling.

“Communicating [those concerns] to Katy is preaching to the choir,” said Dee. “She’s aware of those issues and when at all, tries to accommodate everyone. That gives us more flexibility. This isn’t new feedback — [baseball officials] do their best. It’s a very, very tough job. But sometimes there’s nothing you can do. The weather is going to be what it’s going to be.”

Yesterday saw six postponements — games in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Cleveland were also washed away — and no amount of careful planning and scheduling can avoid a weather pattern that covers the entire Northeast section of the country.

The Red Sox routinely ask MLB to open the season on the road — only once (2002) since 1996 have they begun the year with a home stand — so as to forestall playing in chilly New England as long as possible.

But there’s only so long a team can delay a home opener before it runs into a competitive disadvantage.

“It’s hard to have every team [in the East] play the entire month of April away,” Dee said. “If a team plays its first 14 games on the road and starts the year 4-10, you’re going to have the front office saying this schedule has dug a hole for us. At the same time, no team from the West wants to finish its season playing a lot of games on the road in September (to make up for a home-heavy early portion of the schedule).

“You’re kind of damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”

There aren’t any other quick fixes. Delaying the start of the season to escape April weather would require either a shortening of the 162-game schedule or the return of scheduled doubleheaders.

Both owners and players are opposed to the former because of the lost revenues, while the Players Association is opposed to the latter because of the wear-and-tear that doubleheaders can bring.

For now, baseball can only try to use some common sense in scheduling — and hope for better weather next April.

“By and large,” said Dee, “baseball has done a good job getting games in.”

It’s just that, this year, that’s going to take more patience and creativity than usual.

smcadam@projo.com