In case you haven’t been paying attention to the Mets since last Friday, these are the scores from their last four games, not counting the one in progress as this is being written:

6-25 @Rangers W 14-5
6-26 @Rangers W 8-5
6-28 @Tigers W 14-3
6-29 @Tigers W 16-9

Something crazy is happening to the Mets, and in the world of the Dugout that’s a more dangerous topic than “Roger Clemens stabbed somebody in the heart and paid to have it covered up”. The job of The Dugout is to emasculate the Mets at all cost, and if they keep playing like this I’ll have no choice but to start posting wistful Dugout retrospectives about them on Faith and Fear in Flushing.

Today’s Dugout follows.

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Back in April, the New York Times did a story about Mets knuckleballer/lobber R.A. Dickey and his unusually named bats, and while having a bat named after The Hobbit is pretty amazing, it’s nowhere near as amazing as the retraction at the bottom.

Correction: May 8, 2011

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)

I love living in a world where this is not only factual information about sports, but in need of such a hyper-specific, nerdy retraction. To enjoy today’s Dugout, please remember that R.A. Dickey owns a bunch of bats with Dwight Schrute names and that for a large period of my life I was very lonely and read a lot of books. Today’s Dugout is after the jump.

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