Below The Beltway

Thanks to an expanded playoff schedule, the World Series will end in November for only the second time in history:

Not long after the conclusion of Game 3, or even during its late innings, Major League Baseball and the World Series will go somewhere they have never intentionally gone before: the month of November.

For only the second time since the Boston Americans beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series in 1903, baseball’s champion will be crowned in a month that has always belonged to football and sports with enough sense to play indoors.

“That’s just the way the calendar falls every couple years now,” Katy Feeney, baseball’s senior vice president for scheduling, said in a telephone interview.

Until now, the only time in 106 years that World Series games had taken place in November was 2001, when the Sept. 11 terror attacks delayed the start of the postseason by a week. Oct. 31 turned into Nov. 1 during the 10th inning of Game 4 between the Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks. A few minutes later, Derek Jeter hit a game-ending home run.

He was quickly nicknamed Mr. November.

Forty years ago, the Mets won their first title on Oct. 16. Fifty years ago, all was said and done for the World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers by Oct. 8.

Three expansions of the postseason over the last four decades have made those dates seem quaint.

In 1969, baseball added the league championship series, which expanded to a best-of-seven format in 1985. Since 1995, there has also been the best-of-five division series, meaning that a single team’s postseason run could last 19 games.

The possibility of regular November baseball first arose in 2007 when Fox, the World Series’ broadcaster, requested that the series open in the middle of the week rather than on the weekend. That shift, combined with extra days off in the earlier rounds — like between Games 4 and 5 of the league championship series — has put extra quirks in the calendar.

And on occasion, it has put the boys of summer in ski masks and long underwear.

With the postseason inching deeper into fall, baseball is increasingly leaving itself exposed to the elements, even though experts say there is no marked difference between weather in the last week of October and the first week of November in the Northeast.

“The later you wait, it just gets progressively worse,” said Mark Cane, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia. “Not necessarily so much rainier, but it gets colder and the storms can get nastier. They begin to push it. You get more and more chances of getting winterlike storms.”

That’s especially true this year if, as seems likely, we end up with a New York/Philadelphia World Series, which means all seven games will be played in cities that are likely to get mid-autumn storms that delay games and cold weather.

It’s nuts.