D.C. Sports Bog

Chris Volstad, post-fight. (Via this video.)

Early Wednesday evening, the Nats announced that they were cutting ties with Rob Dibble. Later Wednesday night, the Nats and Nyjer Morgan engaged in that benches-clearing, clothes-line filled, ripped-uniform brawl, in which giant blobs of testosterone came flying out of your television set and sat there oozing all over your floor.

And this, believe it or not, made some of the most persistent Dibble critics a bit wistful.

"God help me, but I have to admit this is the one game where Rob Dibble would have been entertaining," longtime Dibble critic Thom Loverro wrote.

"Am I the only one who wants to know how Rob Dibble would have called the Nats' bench clearing brawl last night?" asked Sports Business Journal's John Ourand, another Dibble critic.

Well then. I promise I won't bombard you with Rob Dibble's take on all things baseball for the rest of your life, but since there appears to be some interest, Dibble did address the brawl at great length on his SIRIUS XM program Thursday morning. And God help me, he made a bit of sense.

The Nats announced on Wednesday that Rob Dibble was permanently leaving the MASN booth -- as Josh DuLac put it in The Post, the team "laid down the smack 'em, yack 'em, sack 'em" on its controversial color man.

Dibble, as far as I can tell, did not comment on the news on Wednesday, but he opened his SIRIUS XM show on MLB Network Radio Thursday morning by reading a prepared statement. It lasted about 25 seconds. Here it is:

"As you may know, I made some statements last week about Stephen Strasburg, and have been called controversial and angered many. In my role as analyst for the Nationals, and [with] the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I now realize that my comments were inappropriate and disrespectful. I have regret that my time with the team will have to end this way, but have learned from the mistake and look forward to putting it behind me."

There was a pause of several seconds.

"All right," said his co-host, Jim Memolo. "Having said that, we move on."

Dibble's job with the Nationals was not mentioned again in the first segment. There was no hint, as there had been last week, that "sick individuals" had twisted his words.

Sports teams don't really hate each other, even hated rivals. For the most part, hated rivals crack jokes on Twitter, hug before and after games, hang out during the offseason and generally behave as civilized adults.

And that, obviously, is as it should be. This is sports. It ain't about hatred and hostility. It's about wearing funny costumes and carrying strange-shaped toys around fields while cashing massive checks.

So I guess there's no logical reason why "rival" owners like Jerry Jones and Daniel Snyder, who both have marketing deals with Papa John's, shouldn't join forces in an ad campaign that will be revealed during their teams' season-opening meeting on NBC. A little bit of commerce never soiled anyone's reputation.

(By Wilfredo Lee - AP)

To get everyone in Major League baseball talking about you when you're a marginal leadoff hitter for a last-place team is no small feat. But playing the heel has always required a unique skill-set, and Nyjer Morgan has that talent.

From plowing over one catcher and objecting to his subsequent benching, to being suspended for an engagement with fans, to plowing over another catcher, to cursing out another fan, it's been a fairly eventful few weeks for Mr. Plush. The apex, of course, came Wednesday in Florida, when he was plunked, subsequently stole two bases in a rout, saw a pitch whiz behind his back, charged the mound, throw a few roundhouses, got clothes-lined, and then triumphantly paraded off the field while beating his chest and raising his arms.

"This guy has some serious problems," one of the Marlins announcers says in the MLB.com version of the melee. "If Major League Baseball doesn't do something about Nyjer Morgan, then they're coming up short."

There are a lot of potential words that could be affixed to that act, seen in full below. "Boring" is not one of them.

Having never seen 10 seconds of Dexter Manley's upcoming TV show, I have no way to judge the quality. But I can dang sure judge the quality of the set's props. In addition to the Dexter bobblehead and the white lab smock and the stuffed animals and the talking water cooler, the producers have now acquired the above poster.

I wasn't previously acquainted with this poster, but it's hard to imagine a better Platonic ideal of the mid-1980s football poster. You can get your own on eBay, if you're so inclined.

For more items from your Redskins past, see Mr. Irrelevant's collection.

If you're watching the Redskins preseason finale on Thursday night, you might see a shot of special teams coach Danny Smith being animated. He's often animated.

And while he's being animated, you'll almost certainly see him chomping the hell out of a golf-ball sized wad of gum.

"He's got a box of gum in his office, you could probably fit an elephant in it, and he's probably gone through about half of it already," kicker Graham Gano told me during training camp.

So, how much gum? Say, in one practice session?

"I don't know a number, but it's triple-digits, easy," Smith told me.

When I mentioned on Tuesday that Lisa Hillary was approaching her last night at Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic, I accurately predicted that her final appearance would be "emotional," as they say.

What I failed to predict was that it would also involve Chick Hernandez lobbing bombs at Philadelphia, Michael Jenkins struggling to carry potted trees around the set, and Hillary singing some Dead or Alive and dancing. My bad.

This is worth a watch. Via @washpostlive.

I can't say I read every Washington-based report on Stephen Strasburg's injury and his potential for recovery, but I've read a lot of them, and they all seemed to strike the right tone.

Kilgore: After one of the most electrifying beginnings to a baseball career in memory and after validating the massive hype that trumpeted his arrival, Strasburg ends his season with an uncertain future. The Washington Nationals will hold their breath, optimistic Strasburg will conform with the odds and return to full health by 2012.

Zuckerman: Recovery time from the ligament replacement surgery is typically 12-to-18 months, meaning Strasburg wouldn't be ready to return until late-2011 at the earliest, a crushing blow to an organization that has pinned much of its long-term hopes on the 22-year-old's right arm.

Boswell: It's bad enough that the best pitching prospect in many years is gone for at least 12 months after only 12 major league starts. But it's even more galling that absolutely nobody can give you an exact reason or a particular culprit or a proper emotional reaction. And nobody can do better than give you rough odds on what kind of pitcher Strasburg will be by opening day of 2012.

Sheinin: If Strasburg sits out 2011, then goes on to have a Hall-of-Fame career, would [drafting him] still be a mistake? I'm not saying that will happen, but I think what's really unwise is leaping to conclusions about the rest of Strasburg's career based on this. Tommy John surgery is commonplace and comes with a very high degree of success.

AP: It's a blow to Strasburg, of course, and to a baseball world that has spent the summer gasping in awe at his 100 mph fastball, bending curves and wicked batter-freezing changeups, but the biggest punch to the gut is to a Nationals franchise that had made the young phenom the centerpiece in their plans to climb out of perpetual last-place irrelevancy....Now he faces something he's never experienced in his baseball life: surgery on his arm and the realistic prospect of not pitching again until 2012.

That's a pretty nice dose of realism, far as I can tell, balanced with data on the high rate of success of the procedure. And yet Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon apparently believe the local media, or at least some segment of that, have been irresponsible in recent days. PTI dialog follows:

Last week, Nyjer Morgan was suspended seven games for throwing a ball into the Philadelphia stands after engaging in "an ongoing dialogue" with a Phillies fan, as Kilgore reported. The league said his actions were inappropriate. He's appealing the suspension.

You might think this would be a time for Morgan to keep a quiet profile in center field, lay low, go underground. Or at least not to blatantly curse out any fans. Well, you'd be wrong.

After Morgan's home plate misadventures in the top of the 10th Tuesday night (lovingly frame-grabbed by Nationals Enquirer), he engaged in the below dialog with a (Marlins) fan in the bottom of the 10th. As Reader Dan points out, it's possible that he was saying "I caught that fat bass up, a fat fish," or something along those lines. Alternatively, his mouth could use a good Soft Scrubbing.

(1997 photo by James A. Parcell - TWP)

When Ralph Campbell first told his three daughters that he was going to start wearing dresses and pig snouts to Redskins games, they weren't sure exactly how to respond.

"I was a teenager," recalled Lori Cole, Campbell's youngest daughter. "It was extremely strange. All of our friends made fun of us - what's going on there? - but later as we got older, we got to see all the events he did. We went to Joe Gibbs stuff, went to Gary Clark stuff, we actually saw the good in it, and then it got to be ok."

Campbell -- who died last week at the age of 73 -- was one of the 11 original Hogettes. He was known as GrandPa (or GrandPaw), since he picked up his first Hogette dress from his mom when he went to visit his newborn granddaughter in 1983. His friends joked that he only went to visit his granddaughter so he could score the dress. He was also the first man to actually volunteer for Hogette duty, approaching his co-worker -- founder Michael Torbert -- and requesting admission.

"I didn't have to convince him," Torbert told me. "He was this heavyset, short, kind of ugly guy. I told him what I was doing. He looked at me and said 'I want to be one of those guys.' I said, well, ok, let's go."