FanHouse Colehamluke

This is all we know for sure: Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Brett Myers is having difficulty returning from hip surgery because of a swollen eyeball. Nobody knows WHY his eyeball is swollen, it just is. His story keeps changing, reports come in and get rearranged, and all we're left with is an incomplete pitching staff and a pretty funny image in my mind of Brett Myers looking like Sloth from The Goonies.

Tonight's Dugout hopes to find the answer, after the jump.

Welcome back to the big leagues, Petey! Three-time Cy Young award winner Pedro Martinez has been signed by the Philadelphia Phillies to bolster their ailing pitching staff as we head into the second half of the season. Pedro signed a $1 million, one-year contract with the World Series champions on Wednesday, and can earn up to $1.5 million in incentives if he pitches at least one game this season without his entire upper body falling off. Pedro in his prime was one of the best I've ever seen, and his career win-loss record is still 115 games over .500. At least he doesn't have to worry about being the oldest guy in the rotation!

The only thing he really has to worry about is Phillies fans hunting him down and murdering him if his signing gets in the way of Philadelphia acquiring Roy Halladay. And hey, maybe next year the Phils can go after Eric Gagne instead of Josh Beckett! Maybe they can get Sidney Ponson, too.

Tonight's Dugout is after the jump.

J.C. Romero can't seem to catch a break. He spends a Manny-esque 50 games banned from baseball for violating the substance abuse policy even though he was following the rules, and nobody really knew what was going on, so they just suspended him anyway. Then he gets accused of physically assaulting a man for making disparaging remarks about said suspension after a Phillies/Rays game on Thursday. The fan, "Robert Eaton," claims that he was tossed around after asking Romero to get him some juice. That's always happening to me, too. My Mom is so mean!

Romero never got the man the juice, and now he's probably going to pay for it by getting suspended again. That's called an assumption, folks, we here at The Internet™ are great at those. One thing we're not good at is accurate reporting, so I will stop here and inform you that the transcript from that night's events has been logged and reported here for posterity. Form your own opinions. Personally, I think J.C. Romero should've gotten the Alabama Jam.

Said transcript is after the jump.

It's possible that tonight, for the first time in the history of major American sports, a championship will be won on a day in which a complete game isn't played in its entirety. We'll tune in to the game, knowing that we may very well see only three innings, but feeling as though we're going to see the same nine innings we see every other day. It'll end before we're emotionally ready, and then, no more baseball for months. Only incomplete passes, invisible fouls, and car doors frozen shut. Whee..

What if the Phillies do win? A nightmare scenario is presented in this afternoon's Dugout, after the jump.

This is Bud Selig.

This afternoon's Dugout is after the jump.

Poor guy looks like he's running on a big piece of beef jerky. It must have been like stealing second on a Crocodile Mile. But hey, one more day of baseball means one more day of World Series Dugouts.

The sequel to the popular FanHouse Era classic is after the jump.

This week, Major League Baseball decided to step up background checks for umpires. The union representing the umpires, the World Umpire Association (famous for such great matches as Kerry Von Erich vs. Umpires), has complied with the checks. But then!

The Biz of Baseball reported that the WUA issued a press release concerning questions being asked during the league's investigations. Among the standard questions to the neighbors (what do you think of barry bonds, how many years of prison should barry bonds get, et al.) was this: do you know if the umpire is a member of the Ku Klux Klan?

hahaha whaaaat

The Dugout asks the serious questions about the Neo Nazi skinheads at Citizens Bank Park, after the jump.