Apparently the Milwaukee Brewers (that’s baseball, right?) traded a player to, well, another team … I forget which.

I heard about it only because a guy was trying to explain it to me in the break room at work yesterday and he didn’t get the signal that he was speaking to a sports agnostic. Under normal conditions, most guys can pick up on my total ignorance of which player is on which team, or even which sport he plays. That’s why conversations between me and most other guys tend to be rather short. If a guy turns to me in the elevator and starts a conversation with, “How about that triple play by Bobby Lee yesterday?” I’ll try to be polite by answering along the lines of, “Yeh? He did pretty good, then?” But the vacant look in my eyes gives away the obvious: I haven’t seen the game or the highlights or even bothered to read the sports page. It’s usually pretty clear I don’t even know who Bobby Lee is: Therefore, I am NOT OF THE BODY. End of conversation.

But yesterday morning I ran into a guy who had an evangelical love of baseball: He felt he would enlighten me with all the implications of the player swap or die trying. My puzzled-dog expression would’ve told any other guy that he might as well have been speaking Chinese, but this guy went doggedly on (har!) as I responded to his enthusiasm with generic filler. “Oh?” “What’d they do that for?” “Well, how about that!” I got the gist (player traded for two other players), but there were apparently some pretty significant consequences for the Brewers that he wanted to impress on me. No matter how many times he tried to hit me over the head with them, though, they didn’t take.

My Mom follows the Brewers pretty closely. She might even have known what he was talking about. Too bad she wasn’t there to explain it.