I’m not going to lie, yesterday’s show was not my best effort. Today we come back with the heat…I hope. Full disclosure: this show is a little heavy-handed. Deal with it.

We first discuss the injury to Reggie Bush which spins to the news that Denver Broncos receiver Kenny McKinley died of what is being reported as a suicide. How are the two related? Well, it’s a larger conversation about how athletes are commodities. Bush could be bigger news because it impacts our fantasy teams. McKinley was anonymous, and a non-factor in the NFL. If the names were reversed, the story of suicide would linger over the NFL for the entire season. The studies about player brain injuries would quadruple and we’d have day after day of reports. Will that happen in the case of McKinley? Should it? And if you answer yes, who gets charged with that task?

If McKinley did, in fact, take his life and if it is, in fact, tied to depression, can it correlate to the player at Penn who took his life last year? Is there any connection — the media was quick (and right) to mention the deaths of Darrent Williams and Damien Nash in the story about McKinley simply because they all played for the same team when they died — to depression, brain issues or even something as simple as talking about the pressures of making it in the NFL? It will be interesting to see where this goes from here. We forget, quite often, that it might be fantasy to us, but there are real people involved.

BASEBALL:

This, of course, leads to a talk about Red Man. Yes that idiot who ran on the field and got tripped by Matt Diaz. We admit to getting a little heavy handed but at some point baseball needs to make an issue out of this to protect the players on the field. It’s one thing to be a silly drunk idiot, but it’s another to go on the field to make a statement. This was obviously pre-meditated, what with the guy in a costume he brought to the game. So who’s stopping the next guy from doing something more “newsworthy?”

HOUSEKEEPING:

We talk about the epic rant by L.A. Parker, a writer I can admit I’ve never once read before, in the Trentonian, a paper I can admit I didn’t know still existed. It’s about Michael Vick, and it’s ridiculous. Now, the claims of racism are not ridiculous, but the premise of the article is so completely wrong and unfounded we’d be doing a disservice to the listener if we didn’t discuss how erroneous the claims are. Take this, for example:

Vick’s life serves as microcosm for thousands of African-American men who made mistakes, suffered convictions, did prison time and then came back to a society unwilling to give them second or even third chances.

Was this written in June? Seriously, did Parker write this in the off-season and just decide to file it now? Not only has Vick gotten second and third chances, but the ENTIRE TOWN seems to want him to be the starting quarterback. It’d be fine if Parker aimed his ire toward Andy Reid, but he didn’t. Instead it’s the city’s fault for not giving Vick another chance…even though we already have.

It’s entirely idiotic. A complete misrepresentation of the situation.

Thanks for listening. We do add a little talk about Mad Men to the end of the show, if you’re interested in that kind of thing.