Sometimes I wonder

The Yankees’s spending spree this off-season is insulting. In this economy  their acquisition of A.J. Burnett, CC Sabathia, and Mark Teixeira for the bargain price of $71.2 million a year is a slap in the face to baseball fans everywhere. Their bloated payroll is a joke, albeit, not a very funny one.

But ESPN writer Jim Caple managed to make me laugh as I read his recent take on this very issue. I was reading aloud the highlights to my manfriend tonight when I paused to look at his face  in order to gauge his reaction to Tampa Bay being referred to as another “rich team that obviously doesn’t care how their free spending ways affect the rest of the league.” I was expecting a wry grin, an amused nod, instead … nothing.  My manfriend appeared as if I was speaking Swahili. And I guess, to him, I was.

“I wish I cared about sports,” he said. “I do. But to me, it’s just some guys playing ball that I don’t know.”

Now, it was my turn to be utterly confounded. I flinched, trying to imagine such a thing. I tried explaining to my mountain biking manfriend that he just had to get to know some of the players. All he needed to do was read up on some basic baseball history and educate himself with the facts in order to  properly loathe the boys from the Bronx.

But this suggestion was as appealing to him as the idea of trading in his brand new Santa Cruz Chameleon for a Huffy. Sometimes I wonder what languages we are both speaking to each other and if there is a manual out there that can bridge the two.