Coming soon to baseball: Mr. November

Los Angeles Angels players looked like they would rather have been anywhere else Friday night except at Yankee Stadium shivering in the Bronx chill during Game 1 of baseball’s American League Championship series.

With temperatures in the mid-30s, the New York Yankees didn’t look too comfortable either, despite their 4-1 victory.

Left fielder Johnny Damon was among the Yankees players wearing ear flaps under his cap, and Dominican-born second baseman Robinson Cano donned a wool mask that covered everything but his eyes.

In weather conditions unfit for furry animals, Major League Baseball is staging its most important games of the year.

Absurd.

But you could see this coming during the past few decades, as television’s money and influence over the erstwhile national pastime grew stronger and baseball’s resistance to it continued to weaken.

The best-of-seven-game Yankees-Angels series began on October 16. When more sensible folks ran big-league baseball, the entire season would have been over by October 16.

Need proof? Don Larsen’s perfect game—the only one in World Series history—gave the Yankees a 2-0 victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 8, 1956.

Larsen’s gem occurred in Game 5, a game played in afternoon sunlight. The Yankees won the Fall Classic three days later.

Weekday afternoon World Series games are a thing of the past. So, unfortunately, will be the Fall Classic.

If the 2009 World Series goes the distance, then Games 5, 6, and 7 will be played in November. The Winter Classic would end on November 4.

The only other time a World Series ended in November was in 2001, when the Arizona Diamondbacks defeated the Yankees in seven games. That year, the terrorist attacks on 9-11 pushed the baseball season back one week.

Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter became the first player to win a World Series game in November, with a home run that decided Game 5.

Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, another Yankees great, was so well-known for his postseason heroics that he became "Mr. October."

Now, “Mr. November” will be a title bestowed annually upon a player who, aided by long johns, gloves, a ski mask and a hot water bottle, generates enough body heat to deliver a game-winning performance.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Baseball team owners and the players association could negotiate a deal to shave one week off the regular season and go back to a 154-game schedule, which had been the norm until the early 1960s.

Furthermore, players and owners could tweak the schedule to allow more doubleheaders (virtually a thing of the past) to ensure that the regular season ends on the final Sunday in September.

Then, the three playoff rounds could be completed by the week before Halloween, instead of the week after.

Yes, baseball would have to leave some television money on the table—an act that baseball owners obviously consider tantamount to blasphemy—but the sacrifice would ensure that the season’s most important games are not played in the worst weather conditions, as they are now.

A National League Division Series game in Denver last week was postponed because of snow and bitter cold.

I covered the 1997 World Series between the Indians and Florida Marlins in which the three games in Cleveland were played amid snow flurries.

We have seen the future of postseason baseball, and it’s f-f-f-freezin’!

It is a future that will include the annual crowning of a “Mr. November” as well as the distinct possibility that players will be scratched from the biggest games of the year because of frostbite.