Watching analysis and listening to announcers debate the accuracy of Aramis Ramirez striking out swinging without swinging (you read that correctly) is so boring you’ll feel like you sat through a powerpoint presentation by the end, but it’s something that needs to be seen.

Here’s what happens: Aramis Ramirez ducks a ball in on the hands, it clips his bat on the way across and the catcher reaches up to snag it. The umpire, going on sound, calls him out. Ramirez claims it hit his hand. It didn’t, and in a world where refs and umpires almost never seem to get it right, a guy made a quick call and nailed it. Ramirez struck out swinging without moving his bat.

It’s a perfect example of how the complexities of pro baseball make it the finest sport ever organized by man. It’s also a perfect example of how baseball is f**king NyQuil in sports-form.

[h/t Big League Stew]

I promise that I want to get something up on the site today that isn’t a weekend recap or a picture of Osama Bin Laden with OBAMA’D in big white letters at the bottom, but today is officially Did You Hear About Osama Day in America. Maybe if I was blogging from Kenya I could report futbol news and a funny video of a busty lady tripping and falling down while crossing the veldt, but no, baseball happened and then we killed a guy.

This week’s Baseball is Boring takes a xenophobic approach to the national pastime, wherein I resort to a combination of CTRL+X and CTRL+V for my USA chants and question the authenticity of Jose Bautista’s birth certificate. I’m sorry, his steroids certificate.

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It's Tribe Time Now (in 1989)

After missing two consecutive Mondays due to an extended hospital stay, I’ve returned to cover the only thing more boring than potassium pills and intestinal blockage: Major League Baseball! Things happen over the weekend, and I’m here to bundle up the important stories and sort of pool the one-to-zero comments we’d get per baseball article into one mega gallery with six-to-zero comments.

The Indians are Still in First Place

They’ve lost three straight and had a game postponed, but we’re 21 games into the season and the Cleveland Indians are still sitting atop the AL Central. I refuse to believe this is an April streak anomaly, and will continue to explain how this is simply the coming-together of young, blossoming talent and healed up veterans looking to recapture the spotlight. It’s about guts, people, and I’m positive the 141 or so more games in the season will prove me right. Who cares if our most marketable star is named “Jeanmar?” Who cares if Fausto Carmona finishes the season 1-22? The Indians are winning the World Series, and I don’t care if me and manager Lou Brown are the only ones who believe it.

The Tribe heads back home on Tuesday to start a three game series against Upstart Nobody Flukes the Kansas City Royals. Monster ace and carnival showman Jeanmar Gomez gets his next start on Saturday against something called the “Detroit Tigers.”

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Wir mussen die Nation ausrotten!

Baseball has been a bit undersold at With Leather, so I’ve decided to take a break from nonstop webcomics and professional wrestling to remedy the problem. Unfortunately nobody likes to read about baseball, because it is boring and not football, so you kinda have to coax people into clicking the link and consolidate everything into concise blurbs, preferably featuring a 65 x 90 picture of Buster Olney. That guy really knows his stuff. Did you realize how important On Base Percentage is?

Anyway, Baseball is Boring is the column to read if you want to kinow what happened this weekend, but you don’t want to know badly enough to find out at a reputable news source. Also, you don’t want to Google “Barry Bonds steroids” in quotes.

Kinsler and Cruz break every record, all at once.

The Texas Rangers’ Ian Kinsler and Nelson Cruz made history by becoming the first set of teammates to homer in each of the first three games of a season on Sunday, closing out a sweep of the Red Sox. The duo set a number of records, because we live in a society that puts things like “most copies sold on Game Boy” in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Here’s the queick list: Kinsler and Cruz came into the game as one of only six teammates to homer in each of the first two games of the season, and Kinsler became the first player to hit a lead-off homer in the first two. Cruz’s homer was the second by a right-handed batter to reach the upper deck in right field at Rangers Ballpark. ESPN set a record by mentioning Cliff Lee for no reason in 100 of their first 100 stories about the Texas Rangers, and the Red Sox became the first team to make me laugh out loud in real life in 2011.

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