You wish, Yankees.

With Spring Training here, it’s time for the most important part of any Major League Baseball preseason – checking out what kind of free stuff teams will be giving away this season. Naturally, most major market and successful teams worth a lick will be giving away the standards like t-shirts and hats, but teams that don’t do as well in drawing fans are sort of like fat girls in the bedroom, in that they need to be better at… certain things.

No team knows this better than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who are trying to gain more fan support not only for the sake of making money, but also to secure a new stadium deal. Of course this means that the team would need some pretty sweet freebies for the Rays faithful, and according to Tampa Bay Times beat writer Marc Topkin, Rays fans will be getting only the best this season.

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Tampa Bay Rays manager Joe Maddon and Washington Nationals manager Davey Johnson have spent the last few days insulting each other over an incident involving pine tar on Joel Peralta’s gloves.

The Washington Post has a full rundown of choice quotes — including Maddon saying Johnson had made a “pussy move” (or “cowardly”, depending on who’s story you’re reading) and Johnson calling Maddon a “weird wuss” with a “Tweeter”. We can only hope this goes on until the end of the season, when the Rays meet the Nationals in the World Series and Fidel Castro is throwing out the first pitch.

Anyway, the “what” of this story is less important than the “why”, so for all your Why needs, today’s Dugout is after the jump.

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Baseball season is officially upon us, and that means only one thing — the return of The Dugout, the Internet’s longest running and most critically acclaimed webcomic about baseball players with pun screen names pretending to curse at each other over AIM. Yes, this is still a thing.

And to celebrate Major League Baseball splitting Opening Day up into like 40 smaller, less important games over the span of a month and at least one ceremony meant to humiliate Muhammad Ali, the normal Spring Training event we like to do has been replaced by Opening Days, a Dugout maxi-series that will span all 25 teams and let you find out what your favorite players are up to in 2012.

There are still only 25 teams, right? Well, 25 important ones. Or was that 5 important ones?

Anyway, whether it takes me a month or I’m still writing Opening Days segments into 2013, here’s episode one: The Tampa Bay Rays.

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For absolutely no reason, welcome to our new weekday feature All Avril Afternoons, where Burnsy and I choose to sit inside and write about Avril instead of running around barefoot in the grass and enjoying what’s left of our youth. Up first is a foul-mouthed transcript from pop-hornstress Avril Lavigne’s most recent visit to Tampa and their Rays, wherein she throws out the first pitch and says a lot of curse words. She’s known to do that. She’s a fountain of forced obscenity, and the only thing plugging her up is the word “like.” And maybe Brody Jenner.

But yeah, this is a music and celebrities site so we’ll move on to The Dugout, which follows after the jump. Be sure to drop a comment and join the ever-growing Dugout community, then head over to Facebook and “like” us for non-stop, exclusive Avril Lavigne discussion.

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Most of the time The Dugout is intended as comedy, but now that I’m in charge of With Leather I am extremely interested in turning The Dugout into a marketable brand. That means an emphasis on new media, a reworking of the strip’s basic content, and the integration of serious, analytical game recaps. What you’re about to read is the first of those, wherein I forget the comedy and just recap what happened in the 9th inning of Tuesday’s game at Progressive Field.

This is simply copy and pasted from last night’s live blog, so if you missed it, here’s your chance to relive an essentially meaningless mid-May match-up between a team who is probably not going to be this good at the end of the season and the CLEVELAND INDIANS. Today’s play-by-play blog follows.

Note: A special thanks goes out to Pat of Where Have You Gone Andy Van Slyke? for winning my “give Kelly Shoppach a screen name that hopefully isn’t about shopping” Twitter contest.

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/glare

Something’s not quite right about baseball season this year. Maybe it needs time to settle. The Baltimore Orioles are 4-0. The Tampa Bay Rays added some big name free agents to their roster and they’ve yet to win a game. Cats and dogs are living together. Mass hysteria.

Whatever the problem, it’s time for the Rays to come together and figure out how to start winning ball games. Tonight they take on the Angels, and because you have never heard a joke about how long that team’s name is before, here is another one: The Los Angeles California Angels of the West Coast of the United States Area Code 90012 But Actually Anaheim.

Today’s Dugout follows.

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