If you watch this video of Richmond Flying Squirrel Eric Surkamp striking out Bryce Harper during Wednesday night’s Harrisburg Senators game, you’re allowed two trains of thought. The first is standing up and going YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, YEAH like the spider monkey in the blaze orange The second is summed up by YouTube user samherb1, who cuts to the chase and says what every sports blogger would say if they didn’t get paid to be inflammatory.

Video after the jump.

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Last year in a game against the Phillies near the end of August, Washington Nationals phenom Stephen Strasburg, a budding superstar with a 2.91 ERA and 92 strikeouts in 68 innings, hurt his arm. MASN analyst and former big leagues pitcher Rob Dibble told him to “suck it up” and do his job. No player is ever 100% healthy, and Strasburg should’ve just went out and pitched again the next night. Stras got checked out and found out he needed elbow surgery, and poof, just like that, he was gone.

Fast forward nearly a year, to the news that Stephen Strasburg will start on Sunday for the Class A Hagerstown Suns, the next major step in a rehabilitation that could see him pitch in Washington in September. Strasburg’s recovery has been going ahead of schedule, and all things considered you could say he was “sucking it up”. So Rob Dibble should be happy, right? Dibble never had a vendetta against the kid, he just disagreed with the situation and maybe misinterpreted some data.

Nope, vendetta.

“There’s absolutely no reason, other than to sell tickets and to put butts in the seats to bring Stephen Strasburg back, to make a few starts at the end of the season. He’s too valuable. He’s too talented to even think about stuff like that. But in their case, you know, having worked with those people, the only thing I can say is that there are some people there that think they invented the game of baseball. Which they did not.

“And so they think they can do things differently than 29 other teams in the game. That’s the problem I had when I was working there, and now, even when I’ve been working on this channel for the last seven years. It’s pretty simple stuff. You want guys to play 15-20 years, you don’t need to rush a guy back just to get a couple starts in so you can sell out the stadium and stuff like that. You know, they’ve been talking about 2012, and what kind of team they’re gonna have in 2012 and stuff like that. And you know, if that’s the case, and you don’t want to put a Bryce Harper in the major leagues until you think he’s ready, there’s really no point in rushing this kid back just to get a couple starts out of him for this year.”

Two major talking points, here:

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If you’re familiar with our A Guide to Recognizing Your Mascots series (specifically the Northwest League edition) you’re familiar with Eugene Emeralds mascot “Sluggo”, a chatty, lime-green bear with abandonment and voyeurism issues. It should come as no surprise to you that Sluggo has now made National News™ by instructing a child to kick a tree in the gonads because he lost a game of musical chairs.

The moment happened during the Emeralds’ “Blue Balls Night” promotion last month and marred the event, Eugene’s second most popular promotion behind “Cockblock Saturdays”. Two ball boys engage in a game of musical chairs with secondary mascot “Douglas Fir”. Douglas cheats to win, shoving one of the little boys out of the seat at the last minute, and because we’re a part of a weird society that rewards horrible behavior in young people, Sluggo blatantly instructs the kid to boot DF between the roots. The announcers even call it “karma”. Shaking my damn head, Eugene Emeralds.

I think true karma would be for Douglas Fir to die and for those kids eventually suffocate to death because they chopped him down and f**ked their own air supply.

[h/t Off the Bench]

I didn’t make the video of this bench-clearing brawl between the Class A Spokane Indians and Vancouver Canadians the header because I need to warn you — it not only contains violence and strong language, but a group of people yelling WAHHHHHHHHHHHH at the top of their lungs because that or chanting “fight” are how people deal with sudden fighting. I recommend turning your volume down, possibly all the way, then enjoying a couple of minutes of minor leaguers throwing hands. Man, people in Vancouver sure to have a lot of pent up aggression, don’t they? At least the players didn’t start smashing storefronts and setting people on fire.

Anyway,

WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FOCKEM UP

Apologies are already being issued, including one from the Texas Rangers, the Major League affiliate of Spokane. The Canadians will start apologizing in a few weeks when people on Facebook start ratting them out.

All it needed was “Down With the Sickness” or some rap hype song like that steel cage lacrosse brawl to make it truly and acceptably viral. And maybe some lens flares. Lens flares make everything look cooler.

[video courtesy of Deadspin]

Hi. This is uh, David Smith, senior. And he is the humannnn … home run. Or the human cannonball. /awkward smile

69-year old “Cannonball” Smith turning himself into a human home run between games of a doubleheader between the Connecticut Tigers and Lowell Spinners on Tuesday, making him the first old man to fly over a minor league fence since the Norfolk Tides manager Gary Allenson went climbing out of spite last month. Smith’s trip was much more dignified, which is funny when you consider he was dressed like an American flag and being shot out of a cannon.

I miss the good old days when you had to actually do something ridiculous like this as a trade if you wanted to be famous for doing something dumb. The very best part of this story isn’t a senior citizen flying to his death on some rural hill, it’s the reverse angle video (after the jump) where you find out he preps for flight with Rick Derringer’s (and more important, Hulk Hogan’s) “Real American”. I’m glad he’s using it, too, because being a human home run is way more American than bodyslamming a fat guy from France.

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So it turns out the Amarillo Sox mascot like to f**k all night.

Things turned sour for Lee as the Sox mascot was supposed to look like a sock but looked nothing like Lee had requested. Instead of a soft looking sock-type mascot from nearly head-to-toe, the foot portion of the sock stuck straight out about 2 feet at the waist.

“It was not the way I wanted it,” Lee said. “I’m very disappointed in the lady who did it, and I’ve told her so. She is going to fix it to the changes we want. I want to say on the record, if we offended anybody, I apologize.”

The Sock, clearly designed by Kyle Farnsworth, has caused a bit of an uproar on the Internet, the one place where things that look like dicks get raised up to glory. Places like Deadspin and Off the Bench are throwing up stories about it, and sure, his two-foot bumblebee cock is pretty hilarious, but as the sports comed-o-sphere authority on terrible Minor League mascots I feel the need to establish precedent.

The problem isn’t that he’s a sock, or that he’s got a big piece jutting out from between his legs. I think it’s the fact that it’s pointy. The Salem Red Sox of the Carolina have not one but TWO anthropomorphic sock mascots (“Lefty” and “Righty”) and nobody flees the games for fear of being f**ked. Here’s a picture of me with one of them. Click it to see a larger version. You know, at uh, at your own risk.

So what can Amarillo learn from this? Well, first things first, move the protrusion to the hip and not the crotch and it won’t look so much like somebody’s junk. Then soften it, and maybe add a Santa Claus face. Oh, and look less like a pervert in a tarp.