About a month ago, I told you that the start of NFL football season is my favorite time of the year.

But if anything competes for my sport obsession affection, it’s October baseball.

Starting tonight, fans of 10 teams, including my own Washington Nationals, will experience the exquisite agony that is playoff baseball.

After 162 games – the longest regular season of any major sport, meaning the average regular season game is far less meaningful than in any other sport – the team you followed closely for six months suddenly is in position to live or die in a five- or seven-game series.

Heck, for the wild card teams sudden death can come in a single game (which is bananas, un-American and a disgrace – but that’s another article).

You can win 95 games and then one autumn evening a groundball takes a funny bounce, and poof! Everything the team has achieved evaporates, and the season ends. After six months of grinding it out nearly every day through 162 games.

Fortunately, investing doesn’t work like that.

Gains are cumulative. They can be compounded over time. And if you diversify and invest strategically, you can make sure that they don’t go poof due to bad luck or an all-too-human error.

Consider the 1991-2005 Atlanta Braves. They won 14 consecutive division titles, the longest such streak in baseball history. But during that period of dominance, the Bravos captured only one World Series, in 1995. That means 13 other seasons ended in heartbreak for the team and its fans. And this was one of the most successful teams ever!

In investing, if you can pile up win after win for 14 years – some of them dramatic, others small – you’ll be rich. There’s no World Series to win or lose. With luck, the reward is even better: many years of financial security and well-earned enjoyment of life.

So keep grinding away, racking up wins. It’s worth it.

P.S. LAST CHANCE! You can still sign up for tonight’s special online unveiling of Jim Pearce’s new Rapid Profits Matrix service. This system, perfected by Jim and an MIT engineer, regularly produces triple-digit winners – and you are among the select few who can get full access starting tonight. Click here for more information.