Primer Dugout

From Wiki Gonzalez

Primer Dugout is dead as a doornail. It was a victim of the move towards forums. Long live the Primer Dugout, as the forums are a wholly inadequate replacement. What follows is what used to be true:

Primer Dugout is for baseball-related topics only. It often includes This Day in Baseball History and links to hot new web articles, which are liable to be submitted as new threads of their own.

When Baseball Prospectus went into "pay" mode, the Primer powers-that-be decided not to link to any article that required a subscription. Primates still wanted to discuss the articles. Therefore the Primer Lounge was founded, wherein people could discuss anything, including the heretofore unlinked Prospectus articles.

Soon, however, it became clear that the Lounge was going to be used solely for childish running jokes and tedious discussions of indie rock music, liquor, and poker, and also porn (if any porn discussion could be considered "tedious").

Thus, the Primer Dugout was created as a place to discussing baseball news and topics for which there was not a dedicated link -- such as the for-pay Baseball Prospectus articles.

To date, there has never been a known discussion of a for-pay Prospectus article in either the Lounge or the Dugout.

Every so often the Dugout devolves into a discussion by Mets fans over why Mets management is so inept. In February 2005, one Mets thread a day began to be posted as a sort of "Mets Dugout," precisely to prevent this sort of devolution. It remains to be seen whether this practice will become a BTF tradition.