You know how when it's cold enough, the umps will allow the pitchers to blow on their hand while on the mound? I mean, that is pretty common knowledge, right? I'd say I learned that not even from playing baseball throughout my youth, but just from watching on TV and listening on the radio. So I don't feel like I'm in some special club for knowing this.

If you didn't know, fine, you learned something new today. But you're not a paid sports radio host. This morning on one of the morning shows (not the "main" station in Boston, a different one), one of the two hosts had just learned this fact and read it to the other guy like it was one of those obscure laws about walking your alligator on Sundays. I figured he had to be joking, but if he wasn't, the other guy would surely say, Yeah, I've known that all my life. But no. The other guy had never heard of this either. So of course they start joking about it--"what, do the umpires have some kind of temperature test they do...hahahaha, that's crazy!" I was so embarrassed for these dudes. This is who they hire for these shows.

And the more I think about it--even if you rarely watch baseball, what's the most common month you'd watch it in? October. And what's one of the coldest months of the baseball season? October. I can't fathom that every single instance in which an announcer in a playoff baseball game has mentioned "pitchers are allowed to go to the mouth tonight..." has slipped past both of these hosts without them ever picking up on it. That is just a terrible job. That was wacky fact one out of five for them. I can't remember the other four, but I'm pretty sure they were all things I assumed everyone, especially "professionals," knew, but that they didn't. Actually, maybe they should just avoid "here's some stuff I don't know" lists in the first place....