Maybe if we didn't have the Yankees-Red Sox playoffs of 2004, men might ramble on about the minutiae of sperm instead. And the result would have been pretty much the same as the NY Times' article.
Is that hard to imagine? Just ask your urologist what urologists talk about when they go out for some beers:
“Only a perfectly normal sperm can penetrate an egg,” said Dr. Harry Fisch, a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center, “and the majority of sperm are abnormally shaped.” Some may have pinheads, others have two heads, some lack tails, a third don’t move at all. As a rule, Dr. Fisch said, a man is lucky if 15 percent of his sperm are serviceable. “One guy I saw had 22 percent,” he said, “but that’s rare.”Sleek, Fast and Focused: The Cells That Make Dad Dad [nyt]