A dugout, sometimes called a one-hitter, is a device used to store and smoke your tobacco via a glass, metal or ceramic bat. The dugout is a rectangular, wooden object with two compartments. The larger compartment stores ground tobacco and a cylindrical compartment is used to store the bat used to smoke from. The dugout usually has a swiveling door which caps the two compartments. A spring at the bottom of the cylindrical compartment pushes the end of the pipe out of the box when the door is opened so that it can be extracted from the box. The sharp edge of the recessed end of the cigarette bat allows the bat to be loaded by burrowing it into the tobacco compartment. The tobacco can then be smoked by lighting it with a flame as one would light a cigarette.

The dugout and bat metaphor alludes to the athletic sport baseball. While it is difficult to explain exactly how such metaphors come about, we can examine some possibilities. The pipe is often called a one-hitter because the recess holds only enough tobacco for one inhale. Because baseball bats are used to hit baseballs, this may be one explanation for the metaphorical term bat often applied to the one-hitter pipe. Another explanation for this term is that some hitter pipes bear a shape resembling a small baseball bat. Because to load the cigarette bat, it is burrowed, or dug, into the tobacco compartment, this may be why the box is called a dugout.