FanHouse Slowlerner

The rumored $15-20 million offer to Stephen Strasburg, of course, isn't anywhere near the largest monetary value thrown around in today's game, but it's a whopper of a salary for a guy who hasn't thrown a single major-league pitch in his life. Perspective is always helpful when discussing huge amounts of money, and the penny serves as a handy visual aid. $20 million, for example, is two billion pennies. That many pennies would weigh over eleven million pounds. That's a lot of pounds! See how easy this is?

Admission to today's Dugout, after the jump, is fifty cents. Just shove it in your CD-ROM drive; it'll get to us.

Some important news and notes from the warped minds at The Dugout:

1. Our annual Spring Training event (hilariously named "Spring Dugz" by Nick), where we cover a different team every day for 30 days, begins on Monday. So if you like ... I don't know, the Astros, be sure you don't miss out.
2. From here on out I won't be "B" anymore, but B. Thompson Stroud. Check the byline. Same letter, same guy, same esoteric jokes about wrestling.
3. Above the words here is an old picture of Dmitri Young being run over by a clownish car, because I felt that image best expresses the 2009 Washington Nationals season.

Now that that's all out of the way, enjoy tonight's Dugout, part 2 of Nationals Lampoon, after the jump.

The consensus opinion of Gary Carter's recently highlighted failure to obtain a major-league managerial job is that he's advertised himself too enthusiastically.

But Gary smells a rat, and I'm with him on this. Baseball has clearly colluded to blackball Gary Carter. Yes, that's right. General managers and owners sit in a smoke-filled room as we speak, unscrupulously grasping at schemes to protect their sport from a really good catcher from the 1980s.

Today's Dugout is after the jump.