HEY GUYS

Before Thursday, the only way baseball players got injured is by conditioning improperly and requiring Tommy John surgery, conditioning properly and requiring Tommy John surgery, kicking or punching inanimate objects in anger, or trying to iron a shirt while wearing it. You never actually break your leg playing baseball, unless you’re the Twins’ Tsuyoshi Nishioka, who did so during yesterday’s game.

As it often tends to do, the real baseball world tends to bend over backwards to accommodate serendipitous Dugout storylines. This is one of those times. In today’s Dugout, we are afforded the opportunity to check in with an old friend.

P.S. this is the first Dugout I’ve written in over a year. Happy to be back. If you’re inclined to hear me say more words about sports, you can find me at SB Nation, where I’m an associate editor, and Twitter, where I’m a jackass.

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For those of you who are new to The Dugout, each year we spend March writing “The Dugout: Spring Training.”  We cover 30 teams in 30 days, and fans of the Pirates or the Astros get their one strip a year before we start calling Alex Rodriguez gay and Manny Ramirez stupid for seven months.  With a March 15 end date set for FanHouse, I started 2011′s Spring Training in the middle of February, thinking it would give me time to get to everyone before I was outsourced.  Out of nowhere, the Sporting News decided they wanted FanHouse to be incomprehensible and awful RIGHT AWAY, and March 15 became March 1.

Now that The Dugout is back in full swing on With Leather, we can pick back up where we left off.  Today’s Spring Training is about the Twins, and it has nothing to do with Jim Thome being a member of the team and me wanting people to like these right away, swear to God.

So read, enjoy, and drop a comment.  I love The Dugout fan community more than I love baseball itself (which is not a lot, apparently), so make your voices heard.  Dugout got, after the break.

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