Courtesy the Houston Chronicle

(January 7, 2011) Continuing with today’s theme of ridiculous events, the world of sports TV and of sports itself is about to receive its requisite skewering with the premiere of Onion SportsDome at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday on Comedy Central.

SportsDome is an undisguised parody of ESPN’s SportsCenter, from whooshing graphics to ludicrous one-liners (“Set your heat shields for re-entry,” “You’re about to get tackled so hard by sports, it’s going to make your rib cage explode”) to puffball, touchy-feely features (an MMA fighter is banned because his prosthetic hands are made of body-pulverizing metal, a young Phillies fan fulfills her wish-list dying dream to attend a Mets game so she can hurl insults at New York third baseman David Wright).

“It’s basically impossible to be more ridiculous than ESPN, both on the level of the inane banter that takes up 25 minutes of each hour and the swooshy, exploding Robocop graphics,” executive producer Will Graham said. “It wasn’t our goal so much to be a parody of them in the strictest sense. We want to be a competitor, only in a slightly alternate universe.”

The show mixes one-liners (Major League Baseball institutes a licensing fee to recall your childhood memories of baseball, the Clippers ask for a do-over for the last 30 NBA seasons after discovering the existence of the 3-point line) with extended parodies (insanely jealous Patriots coach Bill Belichick throws acid in Tom Brady’s face to prevent Brady from leaving him).

Frankly, it’s all too real. Half the stuff sounds like it really could happen, like the Miami Heat rewriting the NBA rule book to ban Kobe Bryant.

Graham and executive producer Julie Smith said the Onion has filmed its first order of 10 SportsDome episodes for Comedy Central and is waiting to hear if the show will be picked up for more. Meanwhile, the company has launched its parody equivalent of ESPN.com, and its fictitious anchors — Mark Shepard and Alex Reiser — are sending out tweets on current events.

“I don’t think there has been a real kind of satirical take on sports in quite a while. I think there is a lot of unexplored stuff to do,” Graham said. “We’re hoping that six or seven years down the line, even 20 years, when they’re playing robot football or whatever kind of sports they will have, that we’ll still be here making fun of it.”

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