The frost is just one sign that Major League Baseball is nearly done with its season, and it was quite unpredictable.
The team I follow most, the Milwaukee Brewers, led its division for more than 150 days. They didn't make the playoffs.
The St. Louis Cardinals did. Of course. They seem to always make the playoffs. They have a great team and a wonderful organization that the Brewers and every other team in the division would love to emulate.
There are plenty of former Brewers participating in the two League Championship series being contested this week. That's the problem - they are no longer Brewers.
St. Louis is managed by a former Brewer catcher, Mike Matheny.
Milwaukee has a strong presence in Kansas City. Managed by Ned Yost with other former Milwaukee coaches, including Dale Sveum - there are three former Brewers at the top of the order: Lorenzo Cain, Alcides Escobar, and Nori Aoki.
J. J. Hardy and Nelson Cruz are former Brewers playing in Baltimore. J.J. was among the players Milwaukee brought up at the start of their rise to respectability.
In San Franscisco, Travis Ishikawa is the lone former Brewer on the roster.
Looking at the former Brewer factor, I'm pulling for the Royals to win the Fall Classic for the first time since 1985. They are a small-market team like Milwaukee, so in a round-about way their victories give reason for on-going optimism for the home town nine.
Yet, it is a long way from the World Series when you sit on the sidelines thinking of what might have been if a hit had fallen here or a shutout pitched there.
The 26 teams on the outside looking in - which include a lot of teams that spent well over 100 million dollars on player salaries - all want to be playing baseball during the cool days of autumn.
For those teams, and their fans - we watch the games and find a rooting interest - while deep inside every player and every fan is that eternal promise to "wait for next year."
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