because

i don't feel like acknowledging that.. whatever the hell that was in the bronx tonight, i am instead going to pass on an innarestin excerpt from jean hastings ardell's book, Breaking Into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime:

...Another essential gender distinction was noticed by art critic Vanalyne Green when she first entered a ballpark (Yankee Stadium, 1984): heterosexual women appreciate the presence of those marvelous ballplayers on the field in a way that their lesbian sisters and heterosexual brethren do not. Elinor Nauen's anthology Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball offers numerous testimonials on this point. In her short story of 1912, "A Bush League Hero," Edna Ferber writes, "when I say that Rudie Schlachweiler was a dream even in his baseball uniform, with a dirty brown streak right up the side of his pants where he had slid for base, you may know that the girls camped on the grounds during the season." In "Why I Love Baseball," Carol Tavris writes, "As a group, baseball players are beautiful to behold. They do not have to be padded or born to the size of the Incredible Hulk; baseball players wear simple, sleek uniforms that reveal the natural physique." And as Bernadette Mayer muses in her ode to Carlton Fisk: "Oh, the legs of a catcher!" Women, Nauen suggests, get more out of baseball than men, "who mostly aren't interested in ogling." The fact that the ballpark offers women a safe place from which to eye ballplayers may not be, in these days, a politically correct idea, but it remains a distinguishing factor in women's appreciation of the game. For example, Eliot Asinof, the author of Eight Men Out, regrets the penchant that many of today's players show for tight-fitting uniforms. In this, he fears, a player gives up an advantage on close pitches: "The pitch brushes your loose-fitting uniform, and you get first base! Tight pants changed the face of American spectator sports," declared Asinof. "There is a tailor in the locker room who measure the players' butts and thighs with a micrometer... Every ballplayer gets fitted so that he can be as appealing as possible to the women in the stands."

Vanalyne Green discovered another gender distinction when she first visited Yankee Stadium. She still remembers her involuntary Oh-my-God sense of astonishment as she looked down at the field. Why, she wondered, had no one told her it was shaped like a womb? For Green, entering the ballpark felt like "walking into a body, a closed space, so from the get-go it's gendered female in a sort of deeply unconscious way," she explained. "Then there were all these circles and spheres, and the cyclical nature of baseball... The first time I ever saw all the zeros at the beginning of the season, it was 'oh, my God' all over again. Rebirth, the idea that you get to try all over again, was another aspect of baseball that was not male." (As we will see shortly, Green was on to something here.) She became so engaged by the game that she spent three years filming the video A Spy in the House That Ruth Built, in which she explores the tensions between baseball's elemental femaleness and her sense of being an intruder in a game dominated by men.

i'd type up more about the roots of baseball in fertility rituals but i'd much rather go off and google for pictures of my favorite players in tight pants.