Everybody's talking about Roy and A.J.

You know what we love? Talking baseball. Okay, fine. You probably already knew that.

But you have to understand where we're coming from here. We spend ungodly amounts of time thinking about baseball pretty much every day, all year round. To give you an idea of the degree to which the game permeates our life, we can tell you that on our honeymoon, Mrs. Tao brought three travel guides and a wedding book and a travel diary, and we brought two baseball preview magazines. (With her blessing, of course. She's swell that way.)

So given this passion for the game and the place that it takes up in our life, we are over the moon about the amount of chatter that tonight's pitching match up has generated in the last few days. In the midst of the hockey playoffs, with deciding games played last night, we had non-baseball fans mention Doc versus A.J. to us last night out of nowhere. Those who know that we're batshit for baseball took a moment to ask us about tonight's game, and what we thought would happen.

We're so excited and drunk on the possibilities that we don't really think we've said anything intelligent in reply to these queries. Mostly it's "Yeah, it's gonna be awesome!" or "I'm totally stoked for it, dude!" or "Oh yeah man! Epic! Woo!"

If we'd had anything insightful to say, we could have tried to convert them to giving up their devotion to pucks in favour of the greatest game of all. What a missed opportunity.

What folks are sayin'
Seeing as how we've been felled by a diminished capacity for cogent thoughts on this game, we'll drop in some links from those who've bothered to pull their shit together and offer actual thoughts and analysis.

The Drunk Jays Fans, naturally, are all over this, With Dustin (Fuck Off) Parkes throwing down hateful thoughts towards A.J., while Stoeten offers up an invaluable DJF Guide to "Welcoming" Returning Players.

Meanwhile, the DJF's nemesis Dick Griff is as understated and reserved as ever, calling this the "Game of the Year". You can take the kid out of the PR world, but you can't take the flack out of the kid, can you? (And as a bit of a sophist ourselves, we say that with affection.)

The rapscallions over at Food Court Lunch have a pretty hilarious breakdown of the matchup, in which words like "Cy Young" and "leader" and "artisan" are used to describe one of the combattants, while the other is referred to as an "asshat" and a "woman" and "like an elderly man urinating". We'll leave it to you to guess which is which.

The Blue Jay Hunter totally stole our Star Wars lightsabre battle idea, but seeing as how we have no photo editing skills beyond right-clicking and saving a photo from the web, it's probably best left in his able hands.

Mop Up Duty drops some statistical analysis of the match up, which just confuses us in our current state of girly giddiness.

Speaking of giddy girlies, Joanna at Hum and Chuck (who loves when people link to her blog and repays them with backhanded compliments and casual contempt) offers a clever alternative to booing A.J..

And as for the Yankees fans and blogs? Well, they are mostly pissing themselves over their overpriced mausoleum and Aubrey Huff's fist pumps, although LoHud's Peter Abraham does have a revealing piece on A.J.'s return. Unfortunately, he is sadly misinformed when he refers to Doc as A.J.'s friend.

Maybe this will assuage our inferiority complex
For those of you who moan about how the American media ignores the Blue Jays, take heart. The four-letter network's Jerry Crasnick has a lengthy piece on the team and their hot start to the season. (He noticed! He really noticed! We're swooning!)