October baseball is Playoff Baseball. It is Reggie Jackson and Bill Mazeroski. It is the best and worst time of the year if your team is still playing. It is a time of great hope balanced with great despair.

My local team, the Minnesota Twins, are done after an epic collapse. My other team, the New York Mets, are in the playoffs after an historic September.

I spent the last week of the September (and hence the last week of the regular season) far away from baseball at a ski resort in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Without internet, I could not watch or listen to the games I wanted to. I could only read the accounts of the games later that ultimately decided the fates of both the Twins and the Mets.

It was like the kind of September I remember from being a kid. Before cable tv, before the 24-hour news cycle, before the internet. It was box scores and game accounts. I felt out of touch but was completely comfortable with that fact. Happier in many ways because of it.

Instead of baseball I read a couple of Agatha Christie novels (which I will review down the line) and a couple of 1940s pulp SciFi novellas(that I will also review sometime). It was an early taste of winter when there is no baseball, only a fireplace and a long evening stretching out ahead of me.

But for the next few weeks, I hope, the Mets will still be playing and I will do my best to watch the games.

Until the World Series is over, winter will need to wait.