FanHouse Bobbycoxer

July was some kind of month. We saw, among other things, a perfect game, an All-Star Game, an exodus of players to competitive teams, our monthly ration of steroid drama, and a baseball executive who was fired for throwing down his shirt as though it were a gauntlet and challenging his players to a fight.

So once again, The Dugout calls upon the insights of Bobby Cox and Charlie Manuel to puree the month of July into a series of easily-digestible puns. Read it after the jump.

June was quite a month. On the field, Randy Johnson earned his 300th win, and the Rockies caught fire after promoting Jim Tracy to manager. Off the field, Donald Fehr stepped down as executive director of the Player's Association, the Nationals drafted super-prospect Stephen Strasburg, and it was learned that everyone in the entire universe has been using steroids.

The Dugout personas of Charlie Manuel and Bobby Cox break it all down in this evening's Dugout, after the jump.

Jeff Bennett is notable for two reasons. First off, he's the unfortunate subject of the most unflattering photograph ever taken (see image right). Second, on Wednesday, he sucker-punched a dugout wall, broke his left fifth metacarpal, and returned to the mound to pitch another full inning.

The fracture didn't seem to adversely affect Bennett's performance. Which begs the question: how many times have you thought, "wow, I sure am glad I have a fifth metacarpal behind the pinky finger of my non-dominant hand! What a wonderful skeletal feature!" I never have. What a worthless bone.

Friday's Dugout is after the jump.

To recap: when The Dugout set forth to preview every team in baseball, we skipped over the Phillies and Braves. Some of you were disappointed, and I attempted to get cute by previewing the Montreal Expos in response. That's when one of our esteemed commenters got mad [sic]:

you do a dougout on the damn Expos? Where is the Braves 2009 preview? How about the damn world champion Phillies?

you suck

I would like to profusely apologize, and I hope to make it up to you by presenting a sober, informed look at both the Phillies and Braves. You can read it after the jump.

How on Earth does Tim Hudson sideline himself due to dehydration? This isn't a scolding, it's pure curiosity. I figured that you can avoid dehydration by drinking plenty of water. If Maslow had constructed a Hierarchy of Preventative Health Measures, wouldn't "drink water to prevent dehydration" be only a level up from "breathe to prevent asphyxiation"?

Today's Dugout is a construction of the only possible understandable scenario I could think of. Necessarily, it is a Spaghetti Western. Read it after the jump.

The "Bobby Cox smacks his forehead like he's Bull from Night Court" picture is the only image of Getty I like as much as Roger Clemens in the Mitchell Report. It's totally out of context and he's just wiping his face, but it's a great tool to illustrate the frustration and utter futility that comes from being the best team in the league for a decade and a half and then immediately becoming, well, what the Braves are right now.

It's not like they're hopeless. There's still a chance they could win the division and then win it 34 more years in a row. There's also a chance that Mike Hampton is going to show up on opening day and tell us he's fine and was just kidding. There's a better chance of Mike Hampton being crapped on by a bird and having that crap infect him with Super SARS and make his head fall off.

Insert 25 cents to read more after the jump.

Sometimes it feels worse to see a horrible thing happen to your friend's team than it does to see something horrible happen to your own. What's worse than that is seeing the very same horrible thing that happened to your team happening to your friend's team. That's what happened today. Jon Bois, one of the guys who does The Dugout with me, is a Braves fan. I'm an Orioles fan.

A few years ago we got General Manager Frank Wren. We'll refer to him as "a rhino that got loose in my house." When he was smashing up my house I could just go, "oh, my house!" Now the rhino has burst through my living room door and trampled everything he could trample on the way to my friend's house down the street. I can go "DUDE LOOK OUT, RHINO" as much as I want, but apparently everyone else on the street (Major League Baseball and those that comprise it) chuckles to themselves and asks, "what rhino?" THE RHINO, YOU GOONS, THAT ONE, RIGHT THERE