Nothing like a Dominican Lou reference at 8 in the morning. Here’s Manny Ramirez being Manny Ramirez and homering off the first pitch in his first AB in the Dominican Winter League. He’ll be a Miami Marlin in NO time! (via Hall Of Very Good)

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Manny Ramirez asked the Oakland Athletics to release him from his minor league contract on Friday, and they obliged.

“It looked like he was down there for a while and I think he wanted out,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said. “He wanted an opportunity, if we weren’t going to do something, to go somewhere else. It is what it is. Certainly we wish him the best.”

“Manny believes he has demonstrated that he is ready to return to the major leagues,” Ramirez’s agents, Barry Praver and Scott Shapiro, said in a statement. “However, given that the Oakland Athletics could not give Manny any assurance that they plan to promote him in the immediate future he asked for his release. Manny thanks the A’s for providing him with this opportunity.” (via Chron.com)

As straightforward as that seems, a helpful YouTube upload reveals that desire and opportunity had nothing to do with it — Manny Ramirez, posing under the name “Manny Rodriguez”, was making the Sacramento Rivercats less wholesome and giving them cancer with his dreadlocks. Just like Lance Armstrong The Bike Guy! A local 69-year old fuddy duddy reports:

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hey guys, what's going on in this chatroom

After a brief hiatus caused by me doing this goddamn comic strip seven years in a row without stopping and needing a break inactivity in the world of baseball, The Dugout is back and ready to tackle the tough issues, such as Manny Ramirez going swimming with a bunch of old people in a T.O.-esque attempt to show he’s still athletic and able to play professional sports.

As we build to the greatest day of the year (pitchers and catchers report~), we’ll go back and touch on some of the stories we may’ve missed, like Jim Thome getting traded to Philadelphia, Kyle Farnsworth miraculously not being traded anywhere and Brian Wilson putting on spandex that looks like a tuxedo so people will write about him when he does his dishes. We’ll also become increasingly obsessed with Albert Pujols, despite his entire story being “I’m great at baseball so whatever, I’ll go play it for a billion dollars somewhere”. We may also write about Dan Quisenberry, even if you don’t give a righteous f**k who that is.

Anyway, welcome back to the weirdest, most well-established, most sorta-racist fictional world in pro sports reporting. Today’s Dugout is after the jump.

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Reality TV’s knockout combo of talking heads and inanimate 38-year old women has made “The Real Housewives Of ______” an easy joke, but when it’s done right, it can be really, really right. Case in point:”The Real Houseweives Of South Boston”, by way of Buzzfeed.

Somehow it manages to be hilarious, exactly like a real Real Housewives episode (complete with inexplicable dinner party) and a perfect encapsulation of every character I’ve ever seen from a movie set in Boston. Seriously, if one of these women had a gun this could pass for five minutes of The Town. If they aired the show as is on ESPN in Primetime I wouldn’t even know it was a joke.

Moments to look out for: Paul Pierce Jr. (and the pitch-perfect dichotomy of prejudiced white folks who love black people), Boston fans only liking home runs (didn’t need a parody video to tell me that) and the phrase “I f**k athletes. These are my trophies”.

[backwards hat tip to Mr. Matt Ufford]

The first thing you hear in this video is “Manny-lammy-ray-soo”, so it pretty much has to be the greatest of all Taiwanese animated video adaptations.

The story, about Manny Ramirez briefly going to jail for smacking his wife in the face and knocking her into a headboard, is not funny. It’s so not funny, in fact, that my normal ability to turn the situation into a laugh in The Dugout has been stifled all day by the idea that a real life man doesn’t deserve his loving, fictional counterpart. Thankfully the women behind the quickest and cheapest adaptive media in the world have already produced a video recap featuring a shirtless Manny in an “MVP” chain, Manny kicking dirt on his wife during an umpire dispute and Major League Baseball using a G-Man with a “suspension” baseball bat to stop Manny from making orange juice.

Also, haven’t you ever wondered how to say “Manny being Manny” in Taiwanese?

When you’re done watching this, be sure to watch the one about Serena Williams where she gets so mad she bursts into flames. Watching them back to back, I’m pretty sure they used the same animation model for Serena and Manny. Good job, Taiwan.

[h/t Sportress Of Blogitude]

That lovable, wacky Manny Ramirez, always watching cartoons in his underwear in his GM’s office, always taking secret pee breaks behind the outfield fence, always, uh, retiring from baseball to avoid drug scandals. Always … beating his wife? This isn’t going where I want it to go. I guess I should recap this from the beginning.

This morning:

Manny Ramirez allegedly slapped his wife in the face with an open hand … causing her to hit her head against the headboard of their bed … this according to the police report.

TMZ broke the story … Manny was arrested at his home in Florida yesterday for battery in a domestic incident.

According to the report, Juliana told police she and the MLB slugger were arguing in the bedroom when Manny … “struck her in the left side of the face with an open hand causing her to hit her head against the headboard of the bed.”

A little later in the morning, Manny appeared at a Boward County courtroom for a bond hearing wherein the judge issued a no contact order and barred him from having any contact with his wife. By 8:30 TMZ was all over the place, flooding their page with nearly every aspect of the story including the 911 call, which makes the situation sound a little bit more like Manny, but still far too weird and casually disturbing to be as funny as it sounds:

During the call, Juliana tells the operator, “Hi, my husband just hit me.”

When the operator asks if she’s safe … Juliana replies, “He’s not doing anything anymore ’cause he knows I’m calling the police.”

As of 9 AM, Manny was being released from a Florida Jail after posting $2,500 bond and ingratiating himself to local media by snatching microphones out of their hands and throwing them. I’ve spent so long trying to find the humor in situations like a football player being stabbed in the stomach by his wife or someone getting nerve damage trying to pry frozen burger patties apart that it takes a few of these posts in a row to get me feeling maudlin, and man, I really do not want to spend the rest of my day and life thinking about Manny Ramirez slapping a woman, going to jail, and then getting pissed at reporters who want to know why he hit his wife in the face.

Regardless, I think the Lady Cop will be in heavy rotation tomorrow.

[via the entirety of TMZ]