"No-hitters are boring."

Jon Lester looks like he is SO BORED after tossing his no-hitter.

As I've said many times before, most of my friends do not care about baseball. This is fine with me. It is also completely acceptable that many of them do not understand the most basic underpinnings of the game, and that they have no interest in my explanations. To each his own, and all that jazz.

However, I totally flipped out on a friend of mine at lunch today, because he had the gall to make fun of baseball with logic that was not only flawed, but based on ideas which are just WRONG.

Thinking he was being witty (in actuality sounding foolish to anyone who knows ANYTHING about the game), he made some comment about how baseball is boring and/or stupid because a no-hitter is considered amazing, and it's a game in which nothing happens. Silly me assumed he knew what a no-hitter was, and asked whether he thought spectacular defensive plays to preserve a no-hit bid were "boring."

Gosh, DeWayne Wise, this is SO BORING. I bet even perfect-game author Mark Buehrle is bored looking at this.

This led to the realization that he had absolutely NO IDEA of what a no-hitter really is. He was under the impression that "no-hitter" meant that no batter made any sort of contact with the ball, and that the whole game was essentially the pitcher and the catcher tossing the ball back and forth, and that it meant that the pitcher would have accumulated twenty-seven strikeouts during the game.

I explained to him that this was, in fact, fallacy in the highest degree, explained the true definition, and added that the record for most strikeouts in a single game is twenty, held by Roger Clemens (twice), Kerry Wood, and Randy Johnson. He continued to argue with me, claiming that some pitcher had struck out twenty-seven "At least once in the last forty years."

At this point, I gave up. Clearly, not only did he have no interest in what was actually true, he couldn't possibly understand the degree of difficulty that would be involved in actually striking out twenty-seven Major League batters, and why any true baseball fan would LOVE to see a game like that, in which, by his definition, "nothing ever happens."

Jason Varitek must have had the most BORING career ever... I'm sure he was practically falling asleep during those four no-nos he caught.

Why I love my Yankee fans:

I know, I know... blasphemy.  But let me set one thing straight: I don't love ALL Yankee fans, just mine.  And what do I mean by my Yankee fans?  Those friends that we all have whose only flaw is loving the Bronx Bombers.  If such a problem can be accepted, there has to be a good reason: for instance, my friend and pseudo-roommate, Becca, is from Manhattan.  She loves the Yankees like I love the Red Sox... that's a lot.

So how are we such good friends?  It's because we both love baseball.  The love for the game, for players who play right, whether they are named Dustin Pedroia or Derek Jeter, brings us together.  In fact, we're leaving tomorrow for New York, to watch the Yankees play the Cubs in the new Yankee Stadium, or, if the weather doesn't cooperate, to watch the Mets play the Red Sox at the new CitiField.  Of course, I would rather we watch the Sox while she would rather see the Yankees, but whichever happens, we will both be happy, because we will finally be watching [exhibition] baseball again.

She knows what I'm talking about when I mention the shortstop logjam, and I can follow her excitement over the NYY pitching staff.  Almost no one in my life will even pretend to listen when I start quoting Dustin Pedroia's newest interview, but Becca does... sometimes reluctantly (this is a multiple-times daily occurrence).  We can talk about the Steroid Era, uniform changes, and obscure statistics, and our only conflict is about which team we want to win in the end, and while that may seem like the biggest problem possible, we deal.

Wanna know the best part?  She thinks A*rod is a dork, too.