The best thing Major League Baseball can do in October? Get right to it

Preoccupied with the White Sox seeking a number that will live in infamy, or at least until the Sox break it next year, a few of us have allowed baseball’s second season to sneak upon us, meaning it is playoff time again.

Postseason baseball (12 teams! One champion!) is not a whole new ballgame. Same game. Same rules. Still, baseball in October is different, as well as unfamiliar at Wrigley Field.

Playoff baseball contradicts the essence of the game. It has a time limit. Three games in the wild-card series. Five games in the division series, seven in the league series, seven in the World Series, a whole other season, true, but with the end in sight.

This does make everything more vivid, more vital, more memorable. Baseball becomes a pencil without an eraser in October. Yet, trying to imitate March Madness, baseball has failed to find its own label. Odd October? October Folly? Autumn Idiocy?

We do notice a possible World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers, and such a match would authenticate what the long slog through summer has been for. And who cannot root for a final slug off between Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani?

Well, before such a thing can happen, much housekeeping must be done, requiring tedium and interrogation, such as how did Milwaukee get better without Craig Counsell and the Cubs get worse with him?

None of that matters now because there is another full month of programming ahead, festooned with wild cards and division titles and league champions and anagrams that require footnotes, all diminishing the regular season and the World Series.

I don’t need more preliminaries. I’ve had April to October preliminaries. I don’t need second thoughts. I don’t need another opinion.

Baseball filled up the spring and the summer and the fall, a persistent presence, self-contained and complete. Still, baseball insists on giving us a whole other season to choose up favorites and I don’t need to. I have mine. And if it isn’t the Yankees and the Dodgers, well, there is always the new NFL kickoff rule to shake my head at.

The phoniness of September (how compelling is a wild-card race, really?) becomes October’s programming. By the time we get to the World Series, we will have forgotten that Ozzie Guillen manages better from the studio than anyone else from the dugout.

You see, everything we’ve dropped in on and out of all baseball season is now meaningless. The ruin of baseball probably started with the designated hitter, but that is an argument for another time. Surely where it is now started with playoffs, grown to four tiers of playoffs, like going again and again to a middle school piano recital hoping they get it right.

October can be glorious, usually is, when the sun is out and the leaves are dappling, and the best part of this time is now given to the least of baseball, best three, best of five. Might as well flip a coin.

The things drag on like tedious game shows, as endless as a presidential primary, so that when the big finish comes, it is stale and late (the only night baseball game that should start after 10 is at a poker table).

If baseball is in such fragile condition of public acceptance that playoffs are the cure, I thought that is what a pitch clock and bigger bases were for.

Here’s a thought. With so-so ratings and sagging interest, why not play in the daytime, why not cut the overextended playoffs by one round, why not make it baseball again?

One must have favorites. I understand. You can’t watch baseball without favorites. That is what is wrong with baseball playoffs and that is what is wrong with baseball wild cards. A pile of strangers.

It has been 20 years of baseball imitating football and basketball and everybody has sort of gotten used to brackets and semifinals and such.

Not me. I want the World Series to start right now. Or Tuesday at the latest. The Yankees and the Dodgers, and if it doesn’t happen, San Diego can keep their pastel uniforms and fish tacos to themselves.