Panic! At The Benzodiazepine Factory: Tuesday Open Thread

For those of you watching the MLB All-Star Game right now: I salute you. You have reached a space of complete boredom, achieved ultimate Slack (praise be to “Bob”), or are trapped underneath a fallen bookshelf and the remote is out of reach. Perhaps if you had given the cat some of your fish at dinner, she’d be willing to drag the remote over instead of plotting which part of your corpse she will eat first.

Hint: likely your nose.

There have been 1,446 Major League games played in a regular season. Discounting the ones played by the Rockies and Marlins, there are 1,258 games where both teams were at least putatively competing to win.* Go watch any one of those- you will derive more joy.

*Pending revelations of the Pete Rose Variety** about current players/managers .

**The betting revelations, not the statutory rape ones***

***Man, fuck that dude. Wherever he’s buried, it should be legal by ordinance to shit on his grave.****

****According to the internet, he was cremated. Alas.

NFL NEWS:

-Shemar Stewart remains unsigned, because God hates Redshirt. With apparently no attempt by the Bengals to revise their position and the near-universal weight of public (and even bootlicking media) opinion on Stewart’s side, I don’t expect him to report Saturday (when Bengals training camp opens for rookies) or particularly soon after that.

And apparently neither does Stewart, who is apparently back at Texas A&M practicing with his former team team to stay in shape.

Or is it more? An insane-but-less-insane-than-it-used-to-be conspiracy says he may try to return to college to play (and presumably continue earning NIL rights payments). While this would almost certainly require litigation to happen, this is a uniquely excellent moment for those wishing to try out novel legal theories against the NCAA (what with the bleeding and the crying and the whimpers of ‘stop, stop, no more!’). Plus, NIL money makes returning to college slightly less financially suicidal than it would have been 5 years ago.

His draft rights would remain with the Bengals. However, the clock is ticking on all of Cincinnati’s high-priced offensive players, both financially and from a wear-and-tear perspective. They’re already struggling to prevent a talent hemmorrhage (Trey Hendrickson) on a below-average defense. So perhaps it is a rare opportunity to put the boot in on Bengals management as well.

-Similarly, 30 of the 32 second-round draft picks remain unsigned. Apparently this is concerted action to force teams to fully guarantee their contracts the way first rounders are. The top two picks in the round managed it already, so good luck guys.

-Garrett Wilson and Sauce Gardner got paaaaaid. Presumably they promised to introduce Brick and Jack to some college girls and get them a case of Natty Light

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