This is why it’s usually a mistake for men and women to play on teams together. I sometimes play in a coed slow-pitch softball league, where the rules say you have to have two women on the field. The teams always have one of the women play catcher, because in slow-pitch softball the batters hit just about every pitch, so it wouldn’t really hurt you much if you had a deceased person at catcher. Our team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am anyway, but there’s no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She’s been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don’t trust her. They know that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, deep in her soul, she would probably elect to save the infant’s life, without even considering whether there were men on base.

This difference in attitude between men and women carries over to the area of talking about sports, especially sporting events that took place long ago. Take the 1960 World Series. If we were to look at it objectively, we would have to agree that the outcome of the 1960 World Series no longer matters. You could make a fairly strong case that it didn’t really matter in 1960. Women know this, which is why you almost never hear them mention the 1960 World Series, whereas you take virtually any male over age 35 and even if he can’t remember which of his children has diabetes, he can remember exactly how Pirates shortstop Bill Mazeroski hit the ninth-inning home run that beat the Yankees, and he will take every available opportunity to discuss it at length with other males.

See that? Out there in Readerland, you females just read right through that last sentence, nodding in agreement, but you males leaped from your chairs and shouted: “Mazeroski wasn’t a SHORTSTOP! Mazeroski played SECOND BASE!” Every male in America has millions of perfectly good brain cells devoted to information like this. We can’t help it. We have no perspective. I have a friend named Buzz, a SUCcessful businessman and the most rational person you ever want to meet, and the high point of his entire life is the time he got Stan Albeck, the coach of the New jersey Nets, to look directly at him during a professional basketball game and make a very personal remark rhyming with “duck shoe.” I should explain that Buzz and I have season tickets to the Philadelphia 76ers, so naturally we hate the Nets a great deal. It was a great honor when Albeck singled Buzz out of the crowd for recognition. The rest of us males congratulated Buzz as if he’d won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

It’s silly, really, this male lack of perspective, and it can lead to unnecessary tragedy, such as soccer-riot deaths and the University of Texas. What is even more tragic is that women are losing perspective, too. Even as you read these words, women are writing vicious letters to the editor, expressing great fury at me for suggesting they don’t take their racquetball seriously. Soon they will be droning on about the importance of relief pitching.

Batting Clean-Up And Striking Out

The primary difference between men and women is that women can see extremely small quantities of dirt. Not when they’re babies, of course. Babies of both sexes have a very low awareness of dirt, other than to think it tastes better than food.

But somewhere during the growth process, a hormonal secretion takes place in women that enables them to see dirt that men cannot see, dirt, at the level of molecules, whereas men don’t generally notice it until it forms clumps large enough to support agriculture. This can lead to tragedy, as it did in the ill-fated ancient city of Pompeii, where the residents all got killed when the local volcano erupted and covered them with a layer of ash 20 feet deep. Modern people often ask, “How come, when the ashes started falling, the Pompeii people didn’t just leave?” The answer is that in Pompeii, it was the custom for the men to do the housework. They never even noticed the ash until it had for the most part covered the children. “Hey!” the men said (in Latin). “It’s mighty quiet around here!” This is one major historical reason why, to this very day, men tend to do extremely little in the way of useful housework.

What often happens in my specific family unit is that my wife will say to me: “Could you clean Robert’s bathroom? it’s filthy.” So I’ll gather up the Standard Male Cleaning Implements, namely a spray bottle of Windex and a wad of paper towels, and I’ll go into Robert’s bathroom, and it always looks perfectly fine. I mean, when I hear the word “filthy” used to describe a bathroom, I think about this bar where I used to hang out called Joe’s Sportsman’s Lounge, where the men’s room had bacteria you could enter in a rodeo.

Nevertheless, because I am a sensitive and caring kind of guy, I “clean” the bathroom, spraying Windex all over everything including the 600 action figures each sold separately that God forbid Robert should ever take a bath without, and then I wipe it back off with the paper towels, and I go back to whatever activity I had been engaged in, such as doing an important project on the Etch-a-Sketch, and a little while later my wife will say: “I hate to rush you, but could you do Robert’s bathroom? It’s really filthy.” She is in there looking at the very walls I just Windexed, and she is seeing dirt! Everywhere! And if I tell her I already cleaned the bathroom, she gives me this look that she has perfected, the same look she used on me the time I selected Robert’s outfit for school and part of it turned out to be pajamas.

The opposite side of the dirt coin, of course, is sports. This is an area where men tend to feel very sensitive and women tend to be extremely callous. I have written about this before and I always get irate letters from women who say they are the heavyweight racquetball champion of some place like Iowa and are sensitive to sports to the point where they could crush my skull like a ripe grape, but I feel these women are the exception.

A more representative woman is my friend Maddy, who once invited some people, including my wife and me, over to her house for an evening of stimulating conversation and jovial companionship, which sounds fine except that this particular evening occurred during a World Series game. If you can imagine such a social gaffe.

We sat around the living room and Maddy tried to stimulate a conversation, but we males could not focus our attention on the various suggested topics because we could actually feel the World Series television and radio broadcast rays zinging through the air, penetrating right into our bodies, causing our dental fillings to vibrate, and all the while the women were behaving as though nothing were wrong. it was exactly like that story by Edgar Allan Poe where the murderer can hear the victim’s heart beating louder and louder even though he (the murder victim) is dead, until finally he (the murderer) can’t stand it anymore, and he just has to watch the World Series on television. That was how we felt.

Maddy’s husband made the first move, coming up with an absolutely brilliant means of escape: He used their baby. He picked up Justine, their seven-months-old daughter, who was fussing a little, and announced: “What this child needs is to have her bottle and watch the World Series.” And just like that he was off to the family room, moving very quickly for a big man holding a baby. A second male escaped by pretending to clear the dessert plates. Soon all four of us were in there, watching the Annual Fall Classic, while the women prattled away about human relationships or something. it turned out to be an extremely pivotal game.