This post starts off with baseball but finishes with underwear, so stick it out. (Star Wars References)

This is a joint story between Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! and The Best Of Everything.

You'd think the job of sports reporting would be easy enough: watch sports, talk to the athletes, and then say what just happened.

And you'd be right. And then you'd think that the job would get even easier when a story is just handed to you, the way "Evan Scribner wears a Yoda backpack" was handed to Deadspin, and you'd be right about that, too, except that when sports reporting, the easiest "job" in the world, crosses light sabers with Star Wars, the source of all Western culture, people get overwhelmed with implications and screwed up reporting even the simplest things.

That's what happened to Deadspin, my source for the latest Star Wars Reference, which is that San Diego Padres' pitcher Evan Scribner wears a Yoda backpack:


Deadspin, getting all hopped up on midichlorians, reported that story in Yoda-speak; the headline is "Something Of A Geek, Evan Scribner Is," and focused on the meaning of it all:

Evan Scribner, pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays Padres, has a Yoda backpack that makes it look as if he is giving Yoda a piggy-back ride. At some point in the last few years, we reached a cultural juncture at which this could either make Scribner a nerd or a hipster. I'm not sure that he's either, but he is a major league baseball pitcher who favors a Yoda backpack that makes it look as if he is giving Yoda a piggy-back ride. That noise you just heard is Americana folding in on itself.

And also the sound of Deadspin not realizing two things:

1. Americana isn't folding in on itself. Americana is Star Wars now, as this series of posts keeps proving.

2. Evan Scribner isn't a geek or a hipster. This is a hipster:







and this is a geek:







And if Deadspin realized that what Dan Savage says (G.F.E.) is true, they'd have done what I did, which is Google why does Evan Scribner wear a Yoda backpack, and they'd have found this Hartford Courant story, which explains that Scribner doesn't wear the Yoda out of any geekery, but out of major league-ery:

"Have to wear it out to the bullpen every day...If nobody else gets called up, I guess I'll have to wear it all year."

That is, Evan is the newest member of the staff, and he's being hazed.

But still, for my purposes, he's being hazed by being forced to wear a Yoda backpack; there are probably 20,000 other silly backpacks he could be forced to wear, and the Padres went with Yoda. They've been doing it for a while. Here's a 2010 picture of pitcher Ryan Webb wearing the Yoda:




It all began, in fact, about August 2010, when the Padres began putting Yoda into team pictures and made the Yoda Pack a hazing ritual; website Topless Robot speculated that it was because then-second baseman (he may be still, I don't know) David Eckstein, is married to Ashley Eckstein:




And Ashley is the voice of "Ahsoka" in Clone Wars:


(Topless Robot spelled her name wrong, by the way.) (Ahsoka was supposed to be trained by Anakin Skywalker, a bit of trivia that never made it into the movies.)

And Ashley Eckstein also makes the "Her Universe" line of clothing, a line of clothing that is said to be "more than Star Wars shirts," a point that is true, as the site also sells Boba Fett-ish underwear:



And that is why you should read this blog and not Deadspin.

That, and because I not only find you the whole story, but also find you sexy lightsaber fights: