(editor’s note: This is Brandon. I was unavailable to write this final push, urging you to sign up for our free fantasy baseball game through DraftStreet.com, so I got some of my old friends from FanHouse to fill in for me. Good luck, and I hope nobody quits!)

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We promise that two beautiful young women are writing this, and not a sports blogger in a wrestling t-shirt sitting in his downstairs bedroom while his cat sleeps on the recliner like two feet to the left. Nope, we are hot and nasty strippers who also happen to like sports, and we think you should like sports, too. If you like sports and have money, we will date you. You like sports. So how do you get money? Why I’m not sure, if you have any suggestions we’d be happy to BOOM FREE FANTASY BASEBALL WITH DRAFTSTREET.

(additional editor’s note: Okay, this is terrible, we aren’t going to use these girls anymore, forget they ever existed. But you should sign up for our game, because it starts tonight at 7:05, and it’s a great, fun way to win some free money. And it keeps our website looking less like this.)

I spent three and a half years writing Dugouts for AOL FanHouse, and only a few topics were taboo. One was the FanHouse Fantasy Girls. I could more or less slander MLB players on a regular basis, but I couldn’t have an ill-dressed stripper reading box scores. I also wanted to make fun of the writing style of Terence Moore.

But do you think they’d let me do that?

Even in a Dugout?

Uh uh.

I don’t think so.

But the most taboo topic of all was Jay Mariotti, the former Chicago Sun-Times columnist and ESPN personality who joined FanHouse in 2009 to write judgmental pieces about athletes who commit spousal abuse and beat the sh** out of his own girlfriend. I wanted to do a Dugout about Tony Reali awarding Jay points for convincingly dragging around his girlfriend by the hair, with Woody Paige getting all jealous and writing “beat wife” on his chalkboard. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

No. Uh uh. (sorry, Terence.)

The good news is that Jay won’t stop being a creep, and now I’m not working for the people who helped kill WCW so I can say whatever I want. Mariotti was in court on Wednesday and plead not guilty to three new felony charges: stalking, corporal injury on a spouse or domestic partner, and assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury. The Los Angeles Times said if he’s convicted, he’ll face up to five years in state prison. His lawyer says they are “complete fabrications.” Who to believe, who to believe.

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This is a test post to see how the critically acclaimed webcomic-slash-absurdist sports blog The Dugout would look on a WithLeather template.  As these paragraphs are also placeholders (standing in for where the informative, context-setting introductory blurbs would go) I will use this space to list off my goals for this project: 1) Treat the Internet like the Old West, 2) get paid to type a bunch of curse words, including as many unedited F-words as I can sneak in, 3) come up with horrible pun screen names for players nobody has ever heard of.

Below is the chatroom itself, with everything uploaded to WL and ready to go.  Hopefully this works, and I don’t have to start drawing this sh** in MS Paint.

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