Opening Day

Today's post is going to be on a topic none of you ever expected to see in this blog: baseball.

I don't know how you could have missed it, but in case you didn't know, I'm not a big sports fan. Once a year, I make a halfhearted effort to learn who won the Super Bowl (I've already forgotten this year's outcome) and that's about it.

However, about a year ago, a New Yorker friend informed me that I am a Yankees fan. Lacking any evidence to the contrary, I agreed with him. Being a Yankees fan seems a fairly simple occupation--I just have to enthusiastically agree with everything he says about the Yankees and badmouth the Red Sox at every opportunity.

This year, my friend raised the stakes and inquired as to the identity of my favorite player. Favorite player? Well, it turns out that selecting a favorite player is not too hard either. Naturally, it had to be a Yankees player, so that narrowed down the field considerably. Normally, when selecting from a pool of options I know nothing about, I choose the one with the most interesting name. But none of the Yankees' names were doing it for me, so I dug a little deeper and started looking for someone with a similar birthday to mine. I came up with Brett Gardner. We were both born in August of 1983. Following this, I discovered he's also left-handed (so am I!) and wears the number 11 (my favorite number!) He's like, a favorite player made in heaven! To seal the deal, by striking (you may interpret this as a baseball pun if that makes you happy) coincidence, he's also under 6 feet tall. As I discovered while perusing the roster, not many baseball players can claim that...but I can. Wow, we have so much in common!

So now, armed with a favorite team, a favorite player, and a rudimentary knowledge of what WHIP means, I am ready to face this baseball season head-on. I am pleased to announce that my favorite player will be the opening batter for his team on this opening day. Whee, this is so exciting! Who knew fandom could be so easy?