Actual changing of the seasons happens Wednesday at Target Field

Let's go … batter up … we're takin' the afternoon off!

It's a beautiful day for a ballgame, for a ballgame, to-day.

Growing up listening to baseball on the radio in the 1960s and '70s, you knew the game was nigh when this 1960 ditty by the Harry Simeone Chorale hit the airwaves (the Cubs and Dodgers used it, among other teams). Decades later, it plays in my head before every game I attend.

It was there in the rain last Friday night at Target Field. If it had been an April rain I'd have been perturbed. But a September rain, well, you count your blessings. I was thankful that I had two home games left on my shared season ticket, two more shots at sunshine, green grass and a warm … well, some kind of breeze.

Mostly, it's a beautiful day for a ballgame Wednesday because it's the last home game the Twins will play for nearly seven months.

I used to dread getting stuck with September baseball tickets. Too often it's a fait accompli, playing out the string, watching your home nine lose to some other team that's headed to the playoffs.

But north of age 50 now, I appreciate September ball. It's a chance to make peace with the end of the season, not only a baseball season, but the end of summer and all that it symbolizes. God knows, nobody bears the end of summer quite as warily as we Upper Midwesterners.

I grant you, there are pennants to be settled, playoffs to carry us baseball fans through October. In Anaheim the sun is shining, as it always seems to be in St. Louis.

If you're a die-hard you can fly to Phoenix to take in some Arizona Fall League, which runs until just before Thanksgiving. Some of the Twins' best prospects are there. I endorse it without reservation. But for most fans, well, the bell tolls for thee.

Baseball is perhaps not as poetic a pastime as some make it out to be, but it is a metaphor for the seasons, the game we play only for as long as the sun and the soil allow it. So last games have a certain poignancy.

The fans in attendance are not there by accident. It's a mix of denial and closure, coming to terms with the inevitable.

Yep, baseball plows under its garden today in Minneapolis — later than some ball yards, sooner than others. What's preordained is that in a matter of weeks they all will be useless — the living creatures that depend on them searching for a sign, any sign, that it's a beautiful day for a ballgame once again.