Jon Lester’s thoughts on pizza with Hanley Ramirez say absolutely nothing (unless you are an idea-starved Boston Herald sports columnist)

Here’s hoping the financially strapped Boston Herald pays Steve Buckley by the word rather than by the magnitude of his idiocy.

After last night’s All-Star game, a reporter attempted to extract a throwaway quote from Jon Lester regarding his days in the minors with former Sox farmhand-turned-superstar Hanley Ramirez. As Buckley puts it, “If, by some miracle…had they perhaps gone out for pizza one night and talked about someday playing in the All-Star Game…”

Lester’s response: “I’d have a better chance of being struck by lightning than me and him getting a pizza together,” he said. “You can take that for what it’s worth. But there was no chance on God’s green earth that I was getting a pizza with him.”

Translation: OK, then. Clearly, the two weren’t buddies. They played a few seasons together in Portland and Augusta, but perhaps had little in common other than the uniform they wore at the ballpark every day.

Time to investigate other possible story angles.

Unless you’re Steve Buckley. If you’re an old Boston sports columnist, this is a good time to write about how guys like Lester are “throwbacks” in the Bob Gibson mold because, in Ramirez, the Sox ace “saw somebody with whom he’d never step out for a pizza. And there’s absolutely nothing unusual about that. What is unusual is that Lester would say so.”

Is it really unusual? Maybe some enterprising reporter ought to take a survey of who is eating pizza with whom. What if guys are lying about who they eat pizza with? Would the Players Association agree to some sort of testing procedure to find out?

This is an embarrassingly stupid premise for a column. At best, it is a lame, backwards attempt to point out that Jon Lester is having a pretty good season. People already know this. At worst, this is the type of silly anecdote that twists an innocuous answer to a lame question and trivializes the hard work put into perfecting the cut fastball.

About the only saving grace for this “column” is that is wasn’t written by Gerry Callahan. Because everybody already knows that only white guys eat pizza and care about winning.