Though this might qualify as the biggest non-story of this Friday afternoon, that doesn’t mean I am precluded from enjoying the heck out of it. From OutSports’ Cyd Zeigler (link swiped from Repoz and Baseball Think Factory)

The blog Fire Joe Morgan has pointed out that something is amiss with the Baseball Prospectus player page of Red Sox infielder Kevin Youkilis. The site uses the first five letters of the player’s last name and the first two letters of his first name to create the unique URL for information on the player. In this case, the URL for Youkilis spells “Youkike.”

“Kike” is to a Jewish person what “faggot” is to a gay person. As chance would have it, Youkilis is Jewish.

Baseball-reference.com has the same naming convention, but they obviously caught the lettering mishap. They replaced the “i” in Youkilis with an l, so their URL reads: youklke.

Openly straight Red Sox fan Michael Liss, who is Jewish, doesn’t see what some of the already-brewing fuss is about.

“I don’t see any reason for them not to change it if it’s been presented to them as an issue,” Liss told Outsports. “But at the same time, I find it ridiculous to be offended by it. It’s a random assortment of letters that doesn’t equal the word it spells.”

That Ziegler was able to locate an openly straight, Jewish Red Sox fan, while not quite on the level of finding the Lindberg baby, is still an impressive journalistic achievement.

And I’d be quite remiss in cutting and pasting the above without adding….(drum roll)….Denis Leary was unavailable for comment.