Rank the following three things, three things that are very plainly just not right, in order of their general creepiness, starting with the worst.

A.) A grown man lurking in the aisles of Costco pretending to be interested in chicken parts when he's actually just waiting for someone to put a small complimentary crab cake or a tiny serving of salsa or an eyedropper full of tuna salad onto a little plastic serving tray next to a hot plate so he can game prep his stomach for dinner.

B.) Hearing John Lennon's "Happy Christmas" played in public on Halloween.

C.) Having a significant portion of the World Series situated between said Halloween and Christmas.

Your results may vary, but the worst of those things to me is B, because while I've seen baseball in November before, I've never heard Lennon's song or any Christmas song played intentionally on or before Halloween; it was unnerving.

Especially in Costco.

Worse, after returning from Costco with a bellyful of crabcake, salsa and tuna salad on the weekend, the same World Series that had begun in the pre-Halloween/Christmas carol era was still very much in progress. To be clear, I have no problem with this particular series, marvelously layered with story lines and historic marquee talent as it is, but the all-out blitz of information exploding from the telecasts is more than anyone should endure.

Or are you cool with being alerted that the man walking to the batter's box right now owns the sixth best postseason pinch-hitting average since 1974?

Swear to God.

I like stats as much as the next guy, as long as the next guy isn't the person who decides which of these inanities should be disseminated immediately and which should be filed under Who Could Possibly Give A Slimy Spent Sunflower Seed? It appears the later file is very thin if not non-existent.

Our plea today: Can someone please find the filter before Joe Buck annotates the next strikeout with something like "and with that punchout he becomes only the fourth lactose intolerant lefty to strike out the side in the World Series since 1968."

There's no point in nailing Buck or Tim McCarver with this indictment. They're only dealing the fun facts they're dealt, nor should anyone infer that the problem is limited to the networks. Old media is equally as enamored with irrelevance this winter, er, fall.

When Pedro Martinez went to the mound for the Philadelphia Phillies in Game 2, one wire service reported, it meant that the 2009 Series was the first in which two pitchers who were acquired in the second half of the season -- Martinez and Cliff Lee -- started Games 1 and 2 for the same team.

What is that supposed to mean?

Is it that all the teams down through the game's exhaustive history that have engaged in the orthodoxy of putting together their starting rotations before the All-Star Game, indeed before the end of spring training, might just have been barking down the wrong drainpipe all along?

I suspect that's not the reason for going public with that factoid. I suspect it's just to show that the Elias Sports Bureau and STATS LLC do not exist in a vacuum. In fact, those slick and admirable operations are built on those vapid questions everyone seems to ask themselves, the ones that start with "I wonder if (fill in the occurrence) has ever happened at any time, anywhere, under any circumstances ... above sea level?

Thus Elias dazzled over the weekend with the news that with the Philadelphia Eagles playing host to the New York Sort-of Football Giants across Pattison Avenue from where World Series Game 4 would be played four hours later, it was the first time that World Series and NFL games matching teams from the same two cities were played in the same city on the same day.

That is so incredible, so darn staggering, that I nearly forgot to think, "So what?"

Oh wait, the significance just hit me. By beating the Phillies, 7-4, that night, well, I can see the graphic now:

New York Yankees have never lost a World Series game played in the same city as an NFL game between teams from the same two cities on the same day.

Here's the basic template, should anyone be wondering, for stats that really should be brought to our attention, relative to, uh, relevance.

Philadelphia's brilliant Chase Utley has five home runs in this World Series. No one who has ever played in a World Series has hit more.

That would seem to be relevant.

Philadelphia's brilliant Chase Utley, who homered twice off Yankees' lefty CC Sabathia in Game 1, became the first left-handed batter to homer twice off the same left-handed pitcher twice in a World Series game since Babe Ruth in 1928, Game 4.

Stop it.

Just stop it.

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