There was a great line floating around during the All Star buzz regarding Chipper Jones' son Shea.

Apparently Jones enjoyed his best daysin Flushing and named his progeny accordingly. To which someone noted it was a good think Shea was not born next year, lest his name be Citi Park.To which, as I understand it, Minnesota manager Ron Gardenhire noted that were it he, the name would have been Tidewater.

Which is funny. Pure and simple.

At least it was funny to me. And, it was funny to those telling the annecdote. And it was funny to everyone I know who had heard the story, and I suspect any of us who more than love baseball.

It made me wonder why stuff like that hits those of us who see more than bats hitting balls or dot racing or bobbleheads or the wave when we got to a game. There is something I think in our mindset: in the very core of the DNA of those of us for whom the game is transcendently lovely, that makes a fascination with statistics as natural as the story of Chipper and his son are funny.

Not that non-baseball folks cannot think the Chipper things is not funny, but chances are most of them would not understand the Gardenhire reference. But, almost everyone gets "Yogi-ism," those classic "huh?" lines from one of baseball's greatest humorists, Yogi Berra.

Such epithets as, "No one goes there any more: it's too crowded," ring goofy for all of us, but even there, somehow, there is what Mark Twain referred to as the "winking relationship between the writer and the reader,"

Twain's notion was that he, the writer, and the individual reader were in on the joke of a character in a story, but the rest of the world did not get the joke, or understand the character is a fool.

I think Yogi-isms are for baseball fans a little deeper, in that same Twainian sense.

For example, there is a story I heard about Larry Andersen, the goofy relief pitcher whose greatest noteriety other than his sense of humor was that he was traded for Jeff Bagwell.

Anderson was also one of the worst hitters ever. As was, as I understood the tale, Ron Herbel, a former Giants reliever of the 60's. So, a clever computer programmer decided to play a World Series of an all Larry Andersen team, against an all Ron Herbel team, with each guy playing all nine positions.

The Ron Herbels beat the Larry Andersens 1-0, in the seventh game of the series, on an error by Larry Andersen.

When asked about this curious simulation match-up, and what happened, Anderson reportedly noted, "The problem was all the players were thinking about Larry Andersen and none of them was thinking about the team."

Which is really funny, and likely unfunny again, to most non-baseball heads. Although in fairness, I suppose if one collects Victorian Doorknobs, there are probably esoteric jokes and references about those items and all of them would make me go, "huh?' in the same way.

But, still, there is something as mythical about baseball jokes and references that cut deeper, in my meager view.

The other day, during an online chat with Todd Zola and Jesse Draper I noted the story about Shea Jones, and Lord Zola informed me that he had heard the punchline was Potter's Field and not Tidewater.

Which kind of proves the point. Because if the punchline has morphed, the story is suddenly akin to an urban legend, and that is the mythology that binds baseball to our hearts, minds, and souls.