PHILADELPHIA — Perhaps if the Marquis de Sade is reincarnated as MLB commissioner for the weekend, there is a chance for NLDS Game 3 to be played in Denver on Saturday night in what could be history’s coldest postseason baseball game. The unofficial current record is a first-pitch temperature of 38 in Cleveland’s Jacobs Field for Game 4 of the 1997 World Series between the Indians and Marlins.

October is generally a benign weather month for baseball — actually drier and warmer than most Aprils with their snowouts and freezeouts. Until the A’s moved to Kansas City in 1955 and the Dodgers and Giants migrated west to Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1958, the 16 major league teams played east of the Mississippi. But when the National League expanded to Denver and Miami in 1993, the words blizzard and hurricane were added to the scheduling equation.
The Marlins missed a Category 5 mega-disaster named Andrew by a year. And Denver’s frequent October snowfalls didn’t become an issue until the Rockies took out the Phillies in a 2007 division series sweep where just one game was played in Coors Field. It was a 2-1 clincher where the game-time temperature was a balmy 73 and dropped steadily after a cold front passed through.
The Rockies’ luck is about to run out. Each computer run paints a bleaker picture of what game-time conditions will be for the scheduled 9:37 (EDT) start. Bitter cold is now a given. Saturday’s high could be below freezing. By game time it could be in the mid-20s with a keening north wind that could drive the RealFeel into the teens. There is also a 30 percent chance of freezing drizzle, snow or a combination. But extreme, wood-shattering cold will be the big story.
Will commissioner Bud Selig and his corporate decision-makers do the prudent thing and spare 50,000 hardy citizens of Coors Nation the discomfort and inconvenience of watching bats explode and hamstrings unravel and bag Game 3 in timely fashion. Or will Bud seize his Chub Feeney moment, declare “It’s a dry cold” and order the Phillies and Rockies to mush ahead for the greater good of TBS and tight scheduling.
And Sunday’s weather is not supposed to be much better.
The culprits are double shots of arctic air charging out of Canada and overrunning the front range of the Rockies before developing into an early-season snowstorm that will ride across the northern third of the nation all the way to New England. The second and stronger shot of cold air is due in the Denver Metro on Friday night through Saturday.