FanHouse Kingofpap

Tonight's Dugout is after the jump.

Manny Ramirez is in the news again for saying... well, I don't know. I haven't had a chance to make the news rounds yet, but I'm going to bet Manny spoke to reporters long enough to tell them that Jamie Hoffman or whoever has severe mental retardation and is therefore "not really a person," and how Manny should be starting in his place, suspension or no. Then two days later Manny apologizes, and we forgive him, because he is really, really good at baseball.

I find it a lot easier to forgive Manny Ramirez on the internet, where his sociological problems can be explained away as childlike innocence. Other things I enjoy doing on the Internet: making grown up millionaires talk like messed up babies, and posting today's Dugout, which is after the jump.

This seriously happens to me every year.

The season ends, and I get depressed. But the offseason still needs Dugouts, so I bust "A" and work hard to find stories and interesting situations for Dugouts throughout the offseason, when no baseball is occuring and everything is heresay and conjecture. Five months go by and we've done 2,000 Dugouts about (essentially) nothing. We keep saying, "Man, I can't wait until the season starts, and doing Dugouts will be easier!"

Then the season starts. Suddenly, it is three weeks later and we've been sitting on our butts loving baseball. We turn to our left, see our computer, go "OH CRAP THE DUGOUT" and spend the entire season making up for the first month we missed.

Oh, and I almost forgot: tonight's Dugout is after the jump.

If we haven't talked about Manny Ramirez enough in our five years of logging AIM chats across the Internet, we're about to do it again; the baseball season is about to start and Car Man-Ram doesn't have a team. One of the reasons for this is the inflated free agent market, and the increasing number of teams focusing on bolstering their benches and bullpen. Another reason Manny doesn't have a team is because his agent is the devil and everyone hates him.

I don't care if he's a goofball. I want to formally extend my offer to Manny Ramirez. I will give you every dollar I make from now until your retirement if you go play for the San Diego Surfing Dogs and I never have to hear about you or how much money you don't want to make again.

Tonight's Dugout is after the jump. You ... jerk.

In what amounts to pretty much the only interesting sports story of the day, Joe Torre has taken it upon himself to write a tell-all book dismissing his former ballclub like so much prostate cancer.

In the book, Joe reveals that Alex Rodriguez is a weird creep, Brian Cashman isn't 100 percent on the level, and George Steinbrenner cares more about the "Yankees" than he does about the people who make up the Yankees. The title of the book, if you're interested in reading it, is Things We Already Knew*.

Sunday's Dugout is after the jump.

As former President Andrew Johnson reported earlier this week, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are not, in fact, the same team. I've never thought of them as an autonomous unit, but rather a set of bookends. Between them lies history, science, geography.. all of the important stuff, everything you need to know. Everything outside of them is just crap on your shelves.

As Andrew pointed out, the teams are run very differently. The Yankees have unzipped their, uh, coin purse and put their dense, cylindrical wrapped coins on the table, scooping up the available big names in a grand fashion that leaves nothing but a cloud of smoke and gold-laced footprints in the faces of the competition.

The Sox have responded by holding up a picture of Dustin Pedroia and trying to find every free agent who looks remotely like him. It's been a running gag in our strip for a while now, but the Red Sox need to sign Delmon and Dmitri Young to keep me from going snowblind next season.

The whitest Dugout u'know is after the jump.

If you're old enough to read this, you're old enough to not go trick-or-treating. You are permitted to go to a friend's hipster Halloween party ironically dressed as George Michael from WHAM! (or, if you're a woman, George Michael from WHAM!), but under no circumstances are you to go door-to-door with your nonsense.

Now that this is established, please enjoy this Dugout about adults trick-or-treating. It's after the jump.

BREAKING NEWS: Some players, such as Boston's Mike Timlin and Philadelphia's Jamie Moyer, are old. During this year's LCS, each has been bad at baseball. This may or may not be because they are old. At this juncture, it is imperative that we all make as many ageist jokes as we possibly can.

"Hey, did you hear the one about the old baseball player who was good at baseball?"

"No."

"Me neither!"

Today's Dugout is after the jump.

The season is almost over, and we're finishing up with the Yankees and the Red Sox. And hey: I'm glad to be rid of at least one of them.

So begins our annual switchover to playoff-themed Dugouts. Or, if you want to be specific, "How Hard Is It To Do Four Dugouts A Week About The Angels."

Tonight's Dugout (chock full of new and seldomly used screen names) is after the jump.

This is the biggest image of Doug Mientkiewicz I could put alongside this post without going off on a sixteen paragraph rant about how it had to be the PIRATES who gave this guy a minor league contract and then were bad enough to need him in the bigs. Imagine if Kevin Maas just showed up out of nowhere playing for the Nationals. It'd be "Maas Hysteria~!" all over again.

Tonight's Dugout is basically one joke that 0.05% of the regular readership of the Dugout, a readership that makes up about 0.005% of Fanhouse traffic, will enjoy. Nothing is truer to the spirit of the old Dugout than a joke that nobody gets or enjoys!

Tumbleweeds and the rest of the Dugout are after the jump.