I don't think the individual in question read any sort of innuendo into it, and I certainly wasn't doing that, either. His take on it was basically it was an a

I don't think the individual in question read any sort of innuendo into it, and I certainly wasn't doing that, either. His take on it was basically it was an awful thing for me to say. When you look at it, "an awful thing for you to say" can be parsed two ways. It might be an awful thing for anyone to say, or it might be an awful thing when it's coming out of the mouth of /certain people/. I considered both of those in an instant, and realized that it couldn't be #1 because he never objected to having someone else say the same sort of thing. That left me with #2. As for the wording, I don't play baseball and I don't watch baseball, but I know that if you "drop the ball", you've basically let the team down. It was yours to make or break, and you broke it. There's enough of the game covered in popular culture to make that very clear: catch the ball or else.