In October, It's All About the Baseball

I've bored my sports fan friends for years with my elegies on October being the greatest month of the year in sports. In the NFL, the games really start to matter; you begin to see the sweaters and coats come out and the players start getting into "mid-season form." The same can be said for college football - there are always a handful of critical matchups that go a long way towards determining who will be in BCS contention at season's end; last year, the October Notre Dame-USC matchup was one for the ages.

But October is really about baseball. As fun as the Super Bowl, NBA Playoffs, and the majors in golf and tennis can be, there is really nothing in sports like October baseball. Of course there is a lot more at stake, but it is more than that - the games just feel different. And look different - during the day, the shadows come into play in a way that they rarely do in the spring and summer. You see the bunting; you see the fans in the stands huddling up, for warmth and to alleviate the sheer tension of the moment. You hear an edge in the announcers' voices that you don't during the regular season.

These games are not fun to watch when your favorite team is involved. The tension at times is almost unbearable - every moment is magnified; a dropped routine fly ball that you can shrug off during the regular season becomes the moment that sends your team home for the long off-season. There are moments of incredible joy (for Giants fans, that would be Will Clark's dramatic single to send the Cubs home and the Giants back to the World Series for the first time in 27 years), and moments of utter despair (for Giants fans, that would be the aforementioned dropped fly ball by Jose Cruz Jr., and just about everything associated with Game 6 of the 2002 World Series against Anaheim). These moments stay with you for the rest of your lives. Out of the blue, you will ask yourself what might have happened if Dusty Baker had gone with Russ Ortiz for one more batter; what might have happened if there had been one more runner on base when J.T. Snow hit that home run against the Mets in 2000.

There will be moments like that this year. Someone will cry tears of joy, and someone will wake up in the middle of the night despairing over what happened in that day's game. That's October baseball.