FanHouse Eckersuponyourhouse

Here is a quick list of excuses to explain where The Dugout has been: our website is producing a code that angers Google and now nobody can look at or operate it properly, we got "busy with life stuff," popular video game or television show is addictive, we had softball practice, we realized baseball was boring and decided to change The Dugout into an endless blog about mixed martial arts, our favorite teams were all eliminated (in my case, "eliminated in April") and therefore we lost interest, our wives had babies, our grandmothers died, our pets reproduced via binary fission, and the most believable one, "we got distracted watching baseball."

Regardless of the excuse you believe, we're back, and tonight we play catchup by over-analyzing everything that has or could happen between now and the end of the season. Who's bullpen will be stronger? Will Guerrero bust out his wonky danger slide again? How many singles will Thome get in the 8th inning? All this and more in our intense playoff blog... thing, after the jump.

Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley has been filling in for Jerry Remy in the NESN broadcast booth recently. Friday night was rough on him: during the Mets-Red Sox broadcast, he managed to commit not one, but two, off-color slip-ups.

We should be able to empathize, I think. To steal a thought from Daniel Okrent in Ken Burns' Baseball, the core nuances of a baseball game are predicated upon the absence of action. There is a lot of nothing going on, and for the broadcasters, there is a lot of space to fill. After a couple of hours in the broadcast booth, I think our verbal inhibitions would begin to slip as well.

Sunday's Dugout is after the fart.