Fundamentals, Fundamentals.

Here is an October evening: up late watching the Braves lose a game they're bound to lose, a wee bit of ice in a wee glass, no conferences scheduled puppetshowward tomorrow, the windows open—and oh, by the way, we're now firmly in that kind of fall wherein if you leave the windows open at night, you'll cool off, and if you leave them open in the day, you'll warm back up. Blanket weather. Damaged sentence weather. Heavy shirt weather, but not any longer flannel weather. That was earlier this week. This morning it was warm in the sun for the first time in days. Tuesday and Wednesday were Novemberish. Today was Septemberish—and this is good, since even though it is now October, we had no September to speak of, and we will take it wherever it is.

There is SanFran's rail-thin Lincecum striking out his twelfth Brave. Here is the place where it gets easier to hope less.

Hoping less: this is the essence of baseball. I love other sports—hell, I love most sports—but there is nothing like 162 games to explain, in full and without question, what heartbreak looks like across a landscape and a timeline. Thirtyish cities take six months to give in to the inevitable. Pitchers and catchers report at the end of February. We look good for next year. There is always, friends and fans of weather and of baseball, next year.

It's dry out there, and cool. And it will be for a time. We'll see eighties, but it won't much matter. It'll still feel like fall. Cut that TV or radio on, tune in to a game, and it'll feel like fall there, too. I used the woodstove out in the writing shed earlier this week, more to check to make sure it still worked than anything else. I won't need it again for a week or so, but now I know, and, as they say in baseball, now you're ready, Perry. Now you're ready. Keep your head in. Be a hitter. Here we go, now. Here we go.