October: more work, baseball, Halloween
People should forget about Halloween and focus on baseball. Professors and fans should remember the playoffs and focus on the Yankees’ victory.
By Christopher Suffron

People should forget about Halloween and focus on baseball. Professors and fans should remember the playoffs and focus on the Yankees’ victory.

It’s October and that means certain events are on the horizon. Bills are ready to be paid and professors are ready to dramatically raise the workload for all of us. However, the two most dominant events in October are, without a doubt, Halloween and the baseball post-season.

Actually, one of these events has overstepped its boundaries. Has anyone else noticed how the Halloween “season” now encompasses two entire months? The Halloween Kid Cuisine commercial has been airing for several weeks now and candy has also been on sale for a couple weeks. Would someone please tell me who would buy Halloween candy in September?

Decorations have been up for a while too. There is a family in my neighborhood back home who puts up their Halloween decorations Labor Day weekend. They don’t just put a paper ghost in their tree and some pumpkin lights around their door either. They drape their entire yard in cobwebs with spiders and bats hanging from the trees. They even set up a graveyard with tombstones for each member of the family on the front lawn. TOMBSTONES! Why anyone would want to surround themselves with death for two months I will never know. If we must decorate our houses in this time of the year, why don’t we put small replicas of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in our lawns for half the month?

Enough Halloween, let’s get to what is good about October and that is baseball. Yes, October is when all but eight teams in Major League Baseball are eliminated. The teams then battle each other until a winner emerges and there are usually no spiders or witches in sight. Every year, we watch as the teams we root for lose round after round until the New York Yankees are crowned champions.

Or at least that is way it seems since the Houston Astros can’t seem to win a game and the Kansas City Royals have not even been to the post-season since they won the World Series in 1985. But it doesn’t matter that our teams don’t win because losing creates character and makes one appreciate the good times.

Fans in New York and Atlanta are missing out on a fundamental part of October and that is getting upset at your team for playing like a bunch of Frankenstein monsters. It is actually almost as much fun getting mad at your team and being disappointed in their performance as it is watching them succeed. Since I can count on one hand the number of World Champions that I rooted for since 1990, I know a little about the subject. As a matter of fact, I usually find myself pulling for the team I know is going to lose. Maybe I have some sort of psychological disease that makes me yearn for disappointment, or maybe I just don’t like winners. Maybe it’s simply because I am a Royals fan.

But whether our teams win this year or wander off to that graveyard in front of the house, we will perform our American duty and watch, hoping that this will be one of those few years our teams actually pull out the victory. Now if only our professors will suspend all our work for a month we’d be set.

Christopher Suffron is a senior accounting major from League City.