C.C. Sabathia, a pitcher for the pennant-winning New York Yankees, was announced as the American League Championship World Series’ Most Valuable Player. “This year,” said one sports announcer whose name I didn’t catch, “he was New York’s Mr. October.”

“Mr. October” was actually, as Little Edie Beale would call it, a sobriquet given to Reggie Jackson. It happened because the esteemed Yankee outfielder had a marvelous 1978 World Series. Since then, any Yankee who does extraordinarily well in the 10th month of the year has been called “Mr. October.”

Okay, but who was Mr. October in New York theater this month?

The first person who comes to mind is Jim Newman for delivering two terrific performances in the first week of the month. After playing in the lead in Marrying Meg at the New York Musical Theatre Festival – doing six performances in eight days – he was only two days later playing the lead in a backers’ audition for Pure Country, a musicalization of the 1992 film about a dissolute singer who’s having a hard time remembering who he ever was. (Both shows were pretty good, by the way.)

If we give the honor to Noah Robbins – and we could, for he’s endearing without being saccharine in Brighton Beach Memoirs -- I know he’d be honored. After all, Eugene Jerome Morris, the character he’s playing, is quite the Yankee fan. And while his brother Stanley Jerome doesn’t have much to say about any baseball team, Santino Fontana is a wonderfully warm, strong man with a good deal of vulnerable little boy in him. Both actors are so convincing as brothers, they’d have to share the prize.

How about Tony Roberts for his remarkable turnaround after falling ill during a performance of The Royal Family? I saw him soon after his return, and admired how he didn’t miss a syllable of dialogue or lose any of his timing. How poignant, though, to hear him discussing Fanny Cavendish’s failing health when he’d just gone through a scare himself. Never mind Mr. October; Roberts proved that he was a man for all seasons.

Maybe Mr. October should be Tracy Letts, who started the month reading some very good reviews for his new play Superior Donuts. This is pretty impressive, because playwrights who win the Tony for Best Play usually don’t do well their next time out. Most get truly awful notices.

Statistics time: Only three Tony-winning playwrights were able to amass a longer Broadway run with their very next work -- and two of them didn’t better their figures by much: Joseph Hayes (The Desperate Hours, 221 performances; Calculated Risk, 230 performances); Tom Stoppard (Travesties, 156; Dirty Linen and New-Found Land, 159) Only Terrence McNally -- whose Love! Valour! Compassion! ran seven months -- saw his next play greatly exceed that run: Master Class, with a 20-month stint.

Superior Donuts may not last as long as August: Osage County, but the critics welcomed the new play in a way that they deny most follow-up efforts. Letts must be at least a contender for Mr. October – though he has some stiff competition from his own cast. Michael McKean immerses himself so much as the doughnut shop owner that theatergoers not knowing he was in the production would be hard-pressed to believe it was he if they were told at intermission. And what about Jon Michael Hill as the African-American lad whom McKean takes under his wing – but whom he can only protect for a while? Hill has a wonderful way of delivering street dialogue and making it sound poetic. Letts gave him a star-making part, sure, but not everyone who has such a role becomes a star from it. Hill makes you believe he will.

Talkin' Broadway once again asked me to be a judge in their annual Summer Theatre Festival Citations, and of course I said yes. This award – for which entries in the Midtown International Theatre Festival, FringeNYC, and the New York Musical Theatre Festival are eligible – has one of the best categories ever: a Wild Card, which means that a judge can pick anything at all that tickles his fancy and captures his admiration. I gave my Wild Card prize to Under Fire's lyricist Barry Harman and composer Grant Sturiale for writing the best song of the summer, "Boom! Boom! Boom!" – and to Andrew Chappelle for delivering it so wonderfully.

Chappelle portrayed a young Central American man who told of his all-consuming desire to get to the United States and play major league baseball. You really found yourself rooting for this kid and believing that he really could make the majors. The song was so good that it demanded an encore, and only seconds into doing it jubilantly, the kid was shot dead by a stray bullet. We were all devastated – and yet grateful that Harman, Sturiale, and Chappelle could wrest those emotions from us. Each of the three is a Mr. October in my book.

Given that many women performers prefer to be called “actors” instead of “actresses,” we should make them eligible for Mr. October, too.

Carrie Fisher in Wishful Drinking made you feel as if you’d known her for years and that she was your dear friend. But has anyone noticed that the way she talks to the audience – and the way she approaches material – makes her a female Dame Edna. (A real FEMALE Dame Edna. Oh, you know what I mean.)

But I’ll strip the Mr. October crown from Fisher because she didn’t name the musical she said her mother (Debbie Reynolds) took her out of school to do. Of course, we all know it was Irene, but would it have killed Fisher to mention it? It might have even got a little applause. (No? Perhaps you’re right.) Surprised, too, that Fisher didn’t mention that in 1980 she did a five-performance “comic extravaganza,” as it was billed, called Censored Scenes from King Kong. Surely with a title such as that, she had to have a good story or two.

Judith Ivey is a Mr. October contender, too, for the expert way she’s playing Ann Landers in The Lady with All the Answers. She doesn’t quite replicate Landers’ own voice – but that’s good. The famed advice columnist had a scratchy and most irritating sound; if Landers had given advice on the radio or TV instead of in print, some people would have rejected what she said simply from the way she came across.

David Rambo won’t be voted Mr. October for writing The Lady with All the Answers. One can see where he asked himself a dramatically sound question: When was the point in Landers’ own life when she was most distressed and could have used some good outside advice? Why, when she discovered that her husband was dating a woman younger than their daughter. Landers, a staunch advocate of marriage, immediately demanded a divorce. Now how do you explain that to your married readers whom you’ve been telling to stay together, no matter what?

Rambo seemed to do everything right, but there was still something missing. Maybe we just went in expecting the life of a gossip columnist would be non-stop hilarious, and we wanted to laugh so long we’d go straight into November.

Anna Deveare Smith deserves the Mr. October crown for writing and performing Let Me Down Easy. Okay, she didn’t quite write the show; she “simply” interviewed and tape-recoded people and then edited what they said. But still, that’s quite a job, and replicating the way these numerous characters talk and making each sound distinctive can’t be easy, either. Smith made each interruptive “y’know,” “the-the-the,” “and-and-and-and-and” sound natural.

But, oh, that Laurie Metcalf as Kate Jerome in the aforementioned Brighton Beach Memoirs! She creates a woman whose face seems to be in a perpetual frown and dour demeanor. But both Metcalf and director David Cromer know there’s more to this lady than that. She has plenty of love in her, and brings it out whenever her family most needs it.

There are so many other contenders: Jude Law for playing you-know-who; Alexander Dinelaris for his crackling dialogue in Still Life; Will Aronson for his delicious music for My Scary Girl; Bryan Putnam, for writing the book, music, and lyrics for The Toymaker. I could easily list 31 genuine contenders -- which means we might just call the award Mr. Day-in-October and celebrate them all.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com