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While Chris "Dry-Hump" Duncan warms the pine, his brother Shelley, a newly minted New York Yankee, is upholding the family honor -- most recently by responding to an autograph request from a young fan at Fenway Park by scrawling "RED SOX SUCK!" in the kid's autograph book.

So sayeth a story in yesterday's Boston Herald.

“'It was cool to get his autograph,'” ten-year-old Griffin Whitman told the Herald. “'It didn’t make me feel happy when he wrote that.'”

-Unreal

Was it the piñata, Homer Simpson or Charlie the Tortoise that kicked Chris Duncan where it counts?

When it came to the latest below-the-belt blow to the St. Louis Cardinals' postseason hopes, the warning signs, reportedly, were there: Manager Tony La Russa has gently hinted that Duncan's baggage has bothered him for the past six weeks. But the Cards skipper had been cagey about the precise nature of his star left fielder's affliction, referring to it as "a lower-half injury."

That all went by the boards in Phoenix over the weekend, after Duncan was forced to depart Saturday's game against the Arizona Diamondbacks, having fallen victim to the euphemistically named "sports hernia."

According to WebMD, a sports hernia is a groin injury that occurs from "overuse of groin muscles, which causes stress on the inguinal wall." The injury can occur "when too much stress is placed on an area...[which] often happens when you overdo an activity or repeat the same activity day after day."

Oh, no!

As faithful readers of STLog are well aware, Dunc's groinal region has been under a great deal of stress over the past ten months, having been made to dry-hump everything from the World Series trophy to an oversize copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Now the slugger's hurting -- in a big, big way: "It can be pretty debilitating," confirms Rick Lehman, medical director of the U.S. Center for Sports Medicine in Kirkwood. "It's a breakdown or tear in the floor of pelvis, which is the kind of gristly thing that holds the muscle structure of your groin together. Every time you stride it, hurts. It's like if you wear same pair of pants for five years straight, the material in the crotch will get kind of thin and banged up."

The down-low damage will more than likely end Duncan's season and require surgery to repair. Call it humpus interruptus.

And Unreal is left to wonder: What, precisely, kicked Dunc in the junk?

Click here to view the entire Hump-O-Rama.

-Unreal

Got him!

-Unreal

Celebrate good times! C'mon, it's a celebration!

-Unreal

-Unreal

Dumbledore's not really dead! Snape's a good guy! Who knew!

-Unreal

Dunc says: iHump, therefore iAm.

-Unreal

-Unreal

Get well soon, big guy!

-Unreal

-Unreal

-Unreal

This week only! Noodlin' with Dunc!

-Unreal

Gerry Fraley had a pretty good (if predictable) story in yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the prevalence of so-called smokeless tobacco among major leaguers. I say predictable because the story was undoubtedly inspired by St. Louis Cardinals phenom Chris Duncan, whose prodigious output at the plate is rivaled only by the prodigious wad that's always present between, as the dippers used to say, his cheek and gum.

Fraley devotes a portion of the story to Major League Baseball's official stance on Skoal, Red Man and the like:

MLB would like to rid the game of tobacco's stain.

Clubs cannot provide tobacco to players, a radical change from the days when clubhouses brimmed with cartons of cigarettes, pouches of tobacco and tins of snuff.

In 1993, MLB banned the use of tobacco by all minor-leaguers not on 40-man major-league rosters and therefore not represented by the Major League Baseball Players Association. MLB hoped the bottom-up approach would wean players from tobacco before they reached the majors.

With that in mind, here's an interesting image from across the pond:

While making note of the MLB logo's proximity to the can o' snuff, don't fail to notice the small print:

Not to cast any aspersions at Covee, which, by all appearances, is one kickass Dutch sporting-goods store -- and a company that promptly got back to me when I asked them about the trade in American snuff and their association with MLB.

"We have been in business for over 30 years," Covee's Edwin Corpeleijn writes via e-mail. "We know several people within the MLB organization. They know we have the logo on the site.... I was told, that as long as we keep the colors the same, it is no problem."

As for the market for Copenhagen in the Netherlands, writes Corpeleijn: "Some players like to have the chewing tobacco, so we buy it. I have never tried it and I will never try it, but since it is not prohibited here, we just sell it to satisfy the customer's needs. We have the pay 275% tobacco tax on these items, but players here do not seem to mind."

-Tom Finkel

I don't miss the inane chatter of the Mad Hungarian, but I do miss me some Cardinals baseball. Thankfully, two months after moving to New York and two weeks into the season, I discovered a Cardinals bar, Dewey's Flatiron, located on Fifth Avenue across from Madison Square Park.

Only a half-hour subway ride from my pad in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Dewey's is perhaps more upscale than my previous Cardinals game haunt, the grease-saturated CWE dive J&A's Bar and Grill. It features good burgers and overpriced drinks. (As is typical in New York, the drinks cost about the same as the burgers.) No one I've asked seems to know how Dewey's became a Cardinals bar. Perhaps the owners saw a niche. (I've also found Brewers and Cubs bars here.)

I chatted with a pair of SLU High grads who were as amazed as I was to find ourselves lusting after Imo's pizza when their ads came on. Cardinals fan Will Leitch of Deadspin was also present. I didn't berate the Illinois native for dragging St. Albert's name through the mud on his Gawker Media-owned blog last year, if only because he was surrounded by a swarm of red-clad screaming girls.

They were yelping largely for Chris Duncan, the hero of the night (inasmuch as there can be a hero in a loss to the Pirates). There was no denying that Dunc's diving catch of Freddy Sanchez's liner to left was a near miracle. Graceful, it was not, however, and even less so was the way he adjusted his chaw for what seemed like the next five minutes, pausing to wipe brown slobber onto his uniform.

I wonder what he'll hump next.

-Ben Westhoff

-Unreal