According to a report from Japan’s Yomiuri Giants, former Kansas City Royals pitcher Brian Bannister has responded to last month’s earthquake and tsunami by quitting his job, fleeing the country and quitting professional baseball forever. Apparently he left the country on March 16, and the team is just getting around to finding out about it now.

Bannister is ditching a one-year deal worth $1.8 million signed in January, which means (assuming he didn’t go to Japan until he signed that deal) he stuck it out for almost two months before he got the Fear of God put into him and threw in the towel. The guy is only 30 years old and isn’t especially worse than some of the lower-level starting pitchers still hanging around in the Majors, but he explicitly told Japanese baseball officials he “has no plans to play in either Japan or the United States.” He then added, “SUPER RUNAWAY” and ran off with his arms flailing in the air.

Brian Bannister spent five years in the Major Leagues, and will always be remembered for temporarily playing baseball.

[Japan Times]

Here’s an odd story out of Baltimore that makes Cleveland look almost respectable by comparison. Five Baltimore Ravens showed up to sign autographs for a Red Cross fundraiser, but then fans got bent out of shape when three players left early. The fans, who paid $50 each to get in, raised over $60,000 for tsunami relief efforts in Japan, but some of that money might be going back into those purple camo pants pockets.

[Some fans] didn’t get signatures from Ed Reed, Joe Flacco and Ray Rice because those Ravens star players didn’t stay for the entire three-hour event.[..]

Red Cross officials said their role was to provide volunteers for the event and didn’t organize it. Defensive backs Haruki Nakamura and Chris Carr remained so everyone who donated money would receive an autograph.

But officials said any fans that didn’t receive their desired autographs and want a refund can call 410-624-2030. The Red Cross will need proof of the donation.

–Ravens Insider [Insider? I barely know her!]

The Red Cross already pledged $10 million to tsunami relief in Japan, which is pretty amazing. They just figured that Americans would just give that much to the cause. I’m not saying that Japan didn’t suffer an amazing tragedy, but think about that: the Red Cross just knew that we’d give that much. Is that enough to buy our way out of hell for all the tsunami jokes we’ve made? I need a ruling on this.

For those of you who are new to The Dugout, each year we spend March writing “The Dugout: Spring Training.”  We cover 30 teams in 30 days, and fans of the Pirates or the Astros get their one strip a year before we start calling Alex Rodriguez gay and Manny Ramirez stupid for seven months.  With a March 15 end date set for FanHouse, I started 2011′s Spring Training in the middle of February, thinking it would give me time to get to everyone before I was outsourced.  Out of nowhere, the Sporting News decided they wanted FanHouse to be incomprehensible and awful RIGHT AWAY, and March 15 became March 1.

Now that The Dugout is back in full swing on With Leather, we can pick back up where we left off.  Today’s Spring Training is about the Twins, and it has nothing to do with Jim Thome being a member of the team and me wanting people to like these right away, swear to God.

So read, enjoy, and drop a comment.  I love The Dugout fan community more than I love baseball itself (which is not a lot, apparently), so make your voices heard.  Dugout got, after the break.

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If you’ve been anywhere near Twitter or a TV in the past 12 hours, you’ve heard about the 8.9 magnitude that has rocked Japan, creating a tsunami that is still washing away everything in its path in the Miyagi Prefecture of northern Japan. It’s terrifying, really, so I felt compelled to point out some links and give anyone interested a place to discuss those events here.

• Images of the devestation can be found here. You will not be the first person to exclaim that these look like promotion still from any generic Hollywood disaster movie. Or the last.
• Al Jazeera is streaming a live news feed on YouTube. Yes, it’s in English.
• The tsunami is not expected to significantly impact the United States. Hawai’i has seen waves up to seven feet tall on its shores, and residual tsunami waves are expected to appear on the west coast. Even though those waves are not expected to be more than a few feet high, some southern California beaches are closing.
• Google has set up a person finder tool and a crisis response page.
• Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was visiting French Polynesia when the tsunami hit Sendai, Miyagi, about 6000 miles away from him. After a questionable attempt at humor, Kimmel reported that he and others were evacuating.
• The least deplorable humor-infused tsunami remark on Twitter came from Dave Chappelle, who tweeted, “maybe the Playstation 4 will be water-proof”…
• …but this might actually be worse than what Chappelle said.

Finally, here’s a video from a guy that apparently sat through one of the aftershocks of the quake. We’ll update this throughout the day; feel free to send us anything you find or write at withleather-tips@uproxx.com.

video via @edsbs.