Dibble Blames Strasburg’s Dad for Non-Firing

Remember Rob Dibble, the Nationals color guy who said last August that Stephen Strasburg should “suck it up” before the rookie learned he had to have Tommy John surgery -- and was subsequently fired?

He’s now blaming Strasburg’s father for his own idiocy.

In an interview with FoxSports.com, Dibble seems to forget that it was his mouth that got him in trouble in the first place, and let the accusations fly.

“Listen, it’s their team, they acted in their own interests,” he said over lunch and wine with fellow curmudgeons Mark Kriegel and Kevin Frazier. “And I’m gonna tell you something that I’ve never told anybody before. It was basically Strasburg’s father [who] e-mailed the owner and basically was offended by what I said.”

Never mind the fact that Dibble was insufferable and drove viewers away from games. Forget that he made sexist comments about female sports fans. It was an e-mail from Strasburg’s father that did him in.

He also makes it clear that because he’s still getting paid by MASN, he wasn’t fired. Someone should tell him that having your contract bought out and being removed from the air probably qualifies as “fired.”

The interview itself is hard to watch -- even we couldn’t stomach it more than once. Why is Dibble still talking about this? Why is the camera work so bad? Have the camera guys been drinking wine, too? Were the fellow diners warned about the presence of stupidity before they were seated? And what's with Dibble's shirt?

So many questions.

If you’ve got eight minutes to watch him spew the very types of nonsense that led to his non-firing, the video is here.

It doesn’t really matter whether he was fired, demoted, or stuffed in a closet. The most important thing is that he’s gone. The average fan probably can't name the new color guy off the top of their head, but they know he's not Dibble. (For the record, the new guy is F.P. Santangelo.)

And hey, ratings are up.

Update: Steven Strasburg has responded to the accusations via his Twitter feed.