I am currently writing about sports from a hotel room in Philadelphia. My girlfriend graduates from Penn State this morning, and I’m in town to mark this very special occasion in her life. The reason I’m mentioning that here is because of the weird thing going on where I leave Texas and important things happen. The last time I left Texas for a few days, the Boston Marathons got bombed and a plant blew up near Waco.

Sometimes, great things happen. For example, I leave Texas for JUST A MOMENT and Norman The Scooter Dog has shown up to throw out the first pitch at a Texas Rangers game and be a dog who rides around on a goddamn scooter all day. Motherf**ker.

Rangers Ballpark in Arlington will be filled with the sounds of cracking bats and barking dogs this evening, as the Texas Rangers hold their annual Bark in the Park event at the stadium.

People can dress their dogs in their best Rangers gear and strut it out on the field during a pre-game parade. The top five best-dressed pooches get a prize. (Registration has already closed for Bark in the Park, so if you haven’t registered, don’t just show up at the ballpark with your dog.)

This year, the event gets a little twist, as Norman, a multi-talented dog who stars in the Hallmark Channel series ‘Who Let the Dogs Out,’ will “throw” the ceremonial first pitch. (via Whatever)

If you aren’t as familiar with Norman as I am, yes, you read that correctly: Norman is a dog who rides scooters and shit, but he is also the star of a Hallmark Channel show named after the Baha Men. Who has the HALLMARK CHANNEL, anyway? That network should just be stillframes of greeting cards and puppet shows with Hummel figurines.

Deadspin has a clip of Norman scootering around the park, which is enough to make me angry at my absence, but I can’t wait to see him throw out the first pitch. I’ll update with video of that as soon as its available.

Until then, please enjoy this Friday-friendly assortment of Norman videos. You’re welcome.

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See that kid in the blue jersey and hat with his face obscured? Yeah, a few seconds before this he’d gotten a home run ball. It’s being thrown back by “his sister,” who is probably not even his sister.

With the Chicago White Sox down 10-4, Adam Dunn launched a ball into the left field stands at the Ballpark in Arlington. A gentleman (a Rangers fan, like everyone else in the picture) caught the ball and gave it to his son. It’s the kind of thing you dream about when you’re a kid. Well, I guess you dream about actually catching it yourself, but your dad snagging it and handing it over is still pretty cool. Anyway, he only had the ball for a few seconds, because the lady to his immediate right — advertised as his sister, although that seems like a cover for “a stranger did this to a small child” — took the ball from him and tossed it back onto the field to a round of applause. In a 10-5 game.

Here’s the clip. Spoiler alert: It has a happy ending.

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Please forgive my inability to identify baseball video games, since the only games that I play are old school Final Fantasy re-releases for the iPad because I’m a ballllllller. Nevertheless, this bro was getting a quick nine innings in recently as his dog looked on, and I assume that the video game umpire made a call that he didn’t like or the dog couldn’t believe that his owner didn’t swing at that meatball pitch.

Either way, TIMBERRRRRRRRRRRRRR! But a huge tip of the cap to the gentleman for his reflexes, because I love my dog more than anything, but a broken TV? That’s at least a one-week belly rub ban, featuring no cookie bones until a Day 5 parole hearing.

However, and this is a rare case of me considering animal-on-TV violence, if my dog chose to freak out and attack the TV over a real-life bad call, I could probably make exceptions. For instance, if I were a Tampa Bay Rays fan and had been watching this call live…

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Behold, the glorious first pitch of Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel.

“Every person kept saying, ‘Don’t bounce it, don’t bounce it,’” Manziel said, according to USA Today. “I was wild, a little nervous.”

Maybe he could look into being Johnny Basketball? I just want the guy to have another sports last name. I want to call him Johnny Two-Sports. And then I want to get Dick Tracy to arrest him.

The USA Today article goes on to helpfully explain how Johnny actually played a little high school baseball, and wore Derek Jeter’s number 2 because of course he did.

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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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Perhaps Tom Hicks is best known for being a shrewd businessman who built his incredible wealth and subsequent empire through hard work and determination, as well as the ability to not give a crap about the little people he may have trampled along the way. However, even if Hicks were declared the Greatest Businessman in the History of Money by a panel including God, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, we’d all still remember him as that dude who destroyed the Texas Rangers (and Dallas Stars and Liverpool F.C.).

Ironically, as the New York Yankees are rumored to be begging Major League Baseball to void Alex Rodriguez’s massive contract, the man who first gave A-Rod the largest contract in sports history is now trying to sell the most expensive estate and property in the United States. Hicks recently listed his Crespi-Hicks Estate in Dallas on the hush-hush, but when a dude tries to sell his home for a whopping $135 million, people are going to talk about it.

It’s not exactly like you can just pop that f*cker on Craigslist and call it a day. So what the heck comes with a $135 million house anyway?

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