Hey guys, what’s going on in this chatroom?

Baseball season is officially underway, and with it comes the return of The Dugout, the long-running, critically-acclaimed thing we do sometimes where baseball players curse at each other in a chatroom. We’ve been doing it so long, when we started people still used chatrooms.

Anyway, the big MLB news of the day is Yu Darvish and his perfect almost perfect game.

The Texas Rangers’ right-hander struck out 14 batters in 8 2/3 innings before yielding a ground ball up the middle to Houston Astros shortstop Marwin Gonzalez. He threw 111 pitches, 78 for strikes, before manager Ron Washington pulled him. The Rangers won 7-0. (via USA today)

If you missed the game, here’s a verbatim reenactment of the final inning. The Dugout is after the jump.

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"F*ck this, I'm outta here."

When it comes to the Canadian National Anthem, I know approximately two words and they’re both in the title. Because of that, I don’t bill myself as the kind of person who is qualified to sing the “O Canada” before sporting events, although I could offer a righteous air guitar and/or beatbox performance sans lyrics if the right lingerie football league team requested it. I’ll leave that up to them, though.

Not knowing the lyrics to “O Canada” didn’t stop singer Jeff Fuller – the tenor, not the former NFL receiver – as he showed off his pipes before yesterday’s Spring Training game between the Houston Astros and Toronto Blue Jays in majestic Dunedin, Florida. Fuller knew several more words to the official jam of America’s hat, but not enough to actually finish the song. So instead of honoring Blue Jays fans, he did a fantastic Tracy Jordan/Frank Drebin impression.

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Earlier this month, the Houston Astros committed what I consider to be the worst play in the history of professional baseball when they turned a sacrifice bunt into a Cirque du Soleil-like dance of futility. I describe it as, “the kind of thing people put into movies about bad baseball teams in the opening montage so you’ll feel happy for them when they stop squatting and farting on the field”.

Now I think they’re just doing it on purpose.

Their latest work (by way of our friends at SportsGrid) features catcher Jason Castro and pitcher Fernando “A Bad Pitcher” Abad simultaneously charging an R.A. Dickey knuckle-swing, running into each other and helplessly falling to the ground as a pitcher beat them to first and a run scored from second.

There’s no way this can be real. Houston decided to amp up the helplessness a la the Washington Generals so even if lose 100 games next year and DON’T run into each other all the time it’ll look like an improvement. Or they’re about to be helped by angels. I don’t know what’s going on, but we need to hurry up and get to the punchline.

[via Yardbarker]

Here’s the recap from Larry Brown Sports, which is so understated it might as well read “baseball game was arranged and performed”.

The Astros and Nats were tied at 4 in the 11th when Kurt Suzuki attempted to move Roger Bernadina up from first to second on a sac bunt. He got much more than he expected thanks to some embarrassingly sloppy fielding from the Astros.

I guess it’s hard to write “a guy bunted and the Astros jammed their fingers into each others’ asses until they lost the game” and feel okay about it. Seriously, I’ve sat here for 10 minutes trying to think of a time when I’ve seen a worse play in baseball, professional or Pony League T-Ball or otherwise, and I can’t do it. Even that picture is confusing. In one tiny little square you get every explanation for the Astros being the worst team in baseball, and for their 4-31 streak heading into this Futility Armageddon moment.

This is the kind of thing people put into movies about bad baseball teams in the opening montage so you’ll feel happy for them when they stop squatting and farting on the field. Get it together, Astros.

UPDATE: Here’s the Benny Hill version, by request.

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Last night, San Francisco Giants pitcher Matt Cain threw a perfect game. The 10-0 victory over the Houston Astros was the first perfect game in Giants franchise history and only the 22nd in Major League Baseball history. Some are calling it the greatest game ever pitched.

Cain, the longest-tenured Giant, has been through it all in his eight seasons in San Francisco. He has seen highs — a World Series title in 2010 — and lows — dozens of losses on nights when he was brilliant.

Through it all, Cain has been unflappable, but that trait never has been tested as it was Wednesday night.

“There’s really nothing like it,” said Cain, who previously had taken five no-hitters into the seventh inning and had a perfect game into the sixth inning of his second start this season.

“I was having to recheck myself to see the signs that Buster (Posey) was putting down. I was thinking about it. It felt like it was the World Series, but it almost felt a little louder.” (via Mercury News)

Cain’s special night is the feature of today’s Dugout, after the jump.

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Shut up, I worked really hard on that headline.

We’ve been playing fantasy baseball with FanDuel.com all season, and the pull keeps getting bigger — in this week’s game, all you need to do is sign up, drop a $2 entry fee and draft up to three teams for your chance at $1000 in prizes. The top 65 players win money, which means even I could win. Not bad!

Here’s how to play:

If you haven’t played FanDuel fantasy with us yet, now’s the time to throw in. It’s fun, it only takes a minute to sign up and draft your teams and if you’ve got a rudimentary knowledge of baseball you can probably win money. So go sign up right now and participate in Friday night’s game! You won’t regret it. I mean, unless you’re the Astros.