Outside Counsel

This is why the Mets can't have nice things. Buffalo was pretty good to the Metropolitans, and having your Triple A guys a $50 buck plane ride away is a pretty good deal. I don't have a clear sense of how things are working out with the Blue Jays so far, but this isn't really Jays country. People will go to Toronto and take in a Jays game, but the hockey rivalry between Buffalo and Toronto is such that it is hard for people here to get behind the idea that we are a minor league for a Canadian team. For the most part loyalties in the Nickel City run to the Yankees first, the Indians after that, probably some BoSox Johnny-come-latelys, and then probably the Mets. Being a Mets fan is an acquired taste. As Bill James once said:

The Houston Astros, I have decided, must be an acquired taste. You know what an acquired taste is, something like French cooking, modern sculpture, jazz, fat women, ballet, Scotch, Russian films...it's hard to define. An acquired taste is a fondness for something the advantages of which are not immediately apparent. An acquired taste in my part of the country is painted saw blades. Do they have those where you are? You go to somebody's house and you discover that above their fireplace they've got a bunch of old, rusty saw blades with farm scenes painted on them, look like a hybrid of Currier and Ives and Norman Rockwell. I don't really understand what the advantages are of having them around, but I figure that they must be an acquired taste. Or like Charlie Chaplin. I mean, W.C. Fields is funny. The Marx Brothers are funny. Charlie Chaplin is an acquired taste.
***************************************************************** Acquired tastes have very subtle advantages. The expression "this must be an acquired taste" is quite useful, inasmuch as it can be adapted to hundreds of situations, meaning something a little different each time.
If you hear the expression "Must be an acquired taste," on leaving a French restaurant or any other restaurant in which the food costs more than $20 a pound and tastes as if the oregano was left out, what it means is "I suppose you'd rather have stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken, wouldn't you?"
On a date, if you hear the expression "Must be an acquired taste," what it means is "This is the last time I'm going out with this bozo."
In an art gallery, if you hear the expression "I guess it's an acquired taste," what it probably means is "What the hell are we doing here?"
If you're discussing a fondness for some particular poet, painter, playwright, or breed of dog with someone you are close to, and he or she says "I guess it's just an acquired taste," what that means is "I don't want to talk about it right now."
"It's an acquired taste" means either that I'm in the know and you're not, or that this is a particular type of sophistication to which the speaker does not aspire.one Astros player looks pretty much like the next one.