No Matter Where You Go…There You Are: Tuesday Open Thread

By the time you read this, the 2024 MLB Trade Deadline will have come and gone. Despite writing this ahead of time, I will use my prophetic powers to make the following predictions:

1. A bunch of guys with ugly-ass chin hair will be traded.
2. At least one of those guys will be traded to the Yankees, where he will be forced to shave that ugly-ass chin hair due to the 50 year-old insane whim of a dead control freak.
3. Despite being an extreme seller’s market, the White Sox and Reds will manage to come away with almost nothing.
4. The Dodgers will be deemed to have won the deadline by dint of having more money to throw at teams and players than anyone else. The fact that this is considered “winning” is a damning indictment of current American capitalist ideology.
5. ESPN will force me to listen to Steven A. Smith and Pat McAfee’s opinions on these deals, despite neither one being able to pick a baseball out of a sportsball lineup.
6. The Most Glorious Béisbol Cardinals will take a measured, prudent but active posture, adding complimentary pieces but not making headlines.

NFL NEWS: TRAINING CAMP DRAMA!

-The injuries are coming fast and furious, with a number of starters and key backups already out for the season with ACL injuries.

-In a completely independent and not-at-all-related development, Titans starting pass rusher Arden Key and former Titan Denico Autry (who signed with Houston in the off-season) are both staring down six game suspensions for performance enhancing drugs. Key and Autry accounted for mor than a third of the Titans’ sacks in 2023. Free agent safety Tashaun Gipson was suspended earlier in July for PEDs as well. Consider that this is in the first week of training camp, with only 20% of players randomly tested through the whole of camp.

-I am not a medical professional, and so I trust my friends who are. As one put it in regard to pitchers and the ubiquity of ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction surgery: muscle training methodologies and PEDs have far outpaced anything that strengthens ligaments. It’s like putting bigger and bigger engines into a car without making any changes to the transmission: eventually the physics cease to work out and something gives way.

-Matthew Judon (Patriots) and Aaron Rodgers (Jets) both Big Mad at training camp. Judon wants a new contract and got angry on the sideline. Rodgers got angry because he got stepped on by an offensive lineman while the offense shat its way through the first “real” (pads-on) practice of camp.

Both men have legitimate grievances: Judon is in the last year of his contract with the rebuilding (read: putrid) Patriots and set to make a relatively paltry $7.5 million, while New England sits on almost $41 million in cap room. Rodgers is watching his Prove I’m An Immortal Superbeing By Bringing The Jets a Super Bowl delusion fall apart around him in the face of the reality that is the New York Jets. Also, I have to imagine that even through all the drugs and psychic damage, having a 300 pound human fuck with your surgically-repaired Achilles still puts The Fear into him.

WHAT TO WATCH TONIGHT:

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Through the Eighth Dimension!

It’s a glorious distillation of 80s-ness and has aged considerably better than most 80s comedies. The cast is tremendous, with all the good guys (except Ellen Barkin) playing it absolutely straight in the face of utterly absurd plotting, writing and set design. It looks like everyone involved is having the time of their lives.