Why are the rescheduled Springsteen shows in 2024? The Phillies are too good.

Are Bruce Springsteen’s postponed Citizens Bank Park shows rescheduled for August 21 and 23 of next year? They are.

So why are the new dates happening so far into the future?

Springsteen would surely prefer to come back to Philly — a stronghold for him, with a half-century of history — sooner rather than later.

But scheduling new dates while the 2023 outdoor concert season lasts is tricky. His schedule is busy, and so are the Phillies, who will settle in at Citizens Bank Park for much of September.

One of the few openings in their schedule this fall is filled by hometown hero Pink, who is bringing her “Summer Carnival” tour with Brandi Carlile to the ballpark on Sept. 18 and 19.

The Phillies’ last regular-season home game is Sept. 28. Springsteen’s final East Coast show before taking October off is in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 29. So why doesn’t he play Philly then?

Because the Phillies are too good. The team currently sits comfortably atop the National League wild card standings. If they finish there, they would host a lesser wild card team at CBP on Oct. 3, to begin a run that could last all month.

» READ MORE: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are coming back to Philly. Is it still ‘the greatest show on earth’?

The window is probably too tight to fit two Springsteen shows in before Oct. 3. Shows of that scale normally require a week for load in, load out, and cleanup. Springsteen’s tour then resumes in November in Vancouver and carries on through the rest of the year.

That takes care of 2023. So why do the Philly shows have to be so late in 2024?

Because they’ll likely be part of a tour that will need to be routed all over the world. And again, any superstar pop acts who are going to play Citizens Bank in 2024 will have to work around the Phillies schedule.

The logical place for the 2024 tour to begin is Australia and New Zealand in the Down Under summer, where the band played in January and February 2017.

The tour could then move to outdoor dates in Europe in the spring and summer. “We’ll be back,” he told a crowd in Monza, Italy, in July. The U.S. dates would likely come next, and the concerts would need to fit into gaps in the Phillies schedule.

Which brings us to August, for what were likely the first dates available at CBP, as aggravating as that may be for Philly fans who bought tickets when they went on sale in February, and will have waited as long as 1½ years before they can use them.

And with the CBP shows happening next August, does that mean Philly fans are losing out on their fair share of Springsteen shows, due to this month’s shows being called off? Probably.

Presumably, if the tour comes back around to the U.S. next summer, Springsteen will return to the cities where he’s most popular, such as New York, Boston, and Chicago.

So although those cities would likely be hit for a second time on his two-year stadium trek, Philly would be getting only the one 2024 stopover, after missing its summer 2023 dates.