Lamentations of a Lady-Fan

As a female fan, I get my share of patronizing looks and remarks, and then stares of amazement when I prove I'm not in it to ogle the players' butts in baseball pants. For instance, this Friday afternoon I was at a club meeting, and a freshman who I'd met once or twice before walked in and asked, to the room at large, "Who are you all picking to win the World Series?"

Of course, I've put a lot of thought into this, and so I immediately answered "Philly."


"No," he shook his head at me. "They're losing to San Fransisco in the NLCS. Tim Lincecum is going to destroy Roy Halladay."

Normally, I enjoy baseball debates, but he had the air of someone who is teaching a stubborn first grader that 1+1 does, in fact, equal 2. I bristled at his tone, and asked him a simple question:

"Really? How many perfect games does Tim Lincecum have under his belt?"

He stared blankly at me, before answering, "Well, none. But how many Cy Youngs does Roy Halladay have? Zero."

I gaped at him in disbelief. "Seriously? Roy Halladay was the Cy Young winner in 2003! In the AL East, no less!"

He then scoffed at the ferocity of competition in that division, calling it overrated, at which point got some backup from another boy in the room:

"Seriously? The three best teams in baseball are in that division!"

"And," I added, "The Red Sox won eighty-nine games with a final lineup that included several players who had started the year in Double-A!"

"So?" The original questioner asked, "The White Sox won more than that and they had injuries!"

At this point, the other members of the (predominantly male) club were staring at us. My friend Steph, the only other girl in the room, and decidedly NOT a baseball fan, was giggling. [This would be a better story if Halladay had shut down the Giants last night, but the Phils lost. Either way, it was not the pitcher's duel most baseball fans were expecting.]

I decided not to correct him. He clearly did not know what he was talking about, and he doubted my credibility as a source in any case (for the record, the White Sox won 88 games in 2010). I'm not sure why he thought I wasn't a reliable source of baseball knowledge, but in the past I've been told that I can't possibly know sports because I am a straight female.

This is exactly WHY I am sometimes judgmental of other fans - shouldn't they be held to the same ridiculous standards of knowledge as I am?

This is ridiculous. I spend 90% of my free time researching, watching, or discussing baseball. I run this blog and another, and I have a veritable library of baseball books. My computer toolbar has six baseball links, one for Twitter (where I discuss baseball), and one for my college's athletics website.


So, clearly my being in possession of a uterus excludes me from intelligent baseball discourse. I'm sorry for wasting all of your time with my yattering about a sport I am biologically unable to understand.