Shane Bacon, writer at Yahoo’s Devil Ball Golf as well as joins the show to talk about the Ryder Cup, which is going on right now. Yes, for one more week of the year, golf is entirely relevant.

We start with a conversation on the FedExCup, which hasn’t been able to capture the audience you’d expect for a tournament full of big names that offers a $10 million prize. Is it too much money? Seriously, are people turned off by that big of a prize that the event has become more of a sideshow than the “fifth” major?

And why not amend the schedule so the FexExCup doesn’t land on the second or third week of the NFL season? End the major golf season on Labor Day weekend and it will have Sunday (and Monday) to itself without any NFL interference. Sure, it’s a holiday weekend, but it’s not an NFL weekend (yet).

(Note: this topic allows me to share my “sports on TV as snack foods” analogy that I’ve had for a while in which the NFL is potato chips, MLB is pretzels and the sports work their way down until sports like MLS are the pork rinds on the shelf: delicious to some, off-putting to many but clearly an acquired taste and something the masses will never purchase and consume every week. There might be more on this later).

Dave Brown of Yahoo’s Big League Stew joins the show to talk about many things baseball. Brown about the lack of fan support. I then .

This show is a lot of that conversation, just through the ears instead of the eyes. Should players have a right to criticize fans? Can you catch more flies with honey than you can calling them embarrassing. (Note: the Rays fans are flies in this metaphor.)

It’s worth pointing out that Brown reported yesterday the — 20,000 of them — in response to the outbursts of their top players. Tuesday’s attendance? 17,891.

We also spend a lot of time on Brown’s Answer Man series. What’s the worst interview he’s done where the schtick didn’t click () and what are some of his favorites? Somehow it turns into some of my favorites, and we talk about before discussing the process of interviewing

Long shows often beget short recaps. This is a bit of a longer show, but it’s a good baseball conversation followed by a really interesting look into the process of a quirky interview. It takes a lot of smarts to come up with so many stupid questions.

Thanks to Dave, and to you for listening.

Another show where the headline explains the show. We wanted to start on baseball but we spent some time talking about the MNF game before randomly happening into more about the Michael Vick (and Ben Roethlisberger) situations. We discuss the same conversation we’ve had before (with a different perspective now that Vick is really really good and, with regard to Ben, Pittsburgh is really really good without him).

Does perception change that much because of wins? It’s not that Vick has paid his debt and blah blah blah. It’s whether fans would be making an issue out of it if he were terrible, but excuse it because he’s good.

We neglected to laud the people at Dexter on yesterday’s show (during our brief recap) for the scene in which Dexter talks to the funeral director who, in wonderful fashion, is EXACTLY like Michael C. Hall’s character on Six Feet Under. A wonderfully crafted scene.

BASEBALL TALK:

The Phillies are National League East champs again. Deal with our glee. We talk about the run for the Phillies a lot, patting ourselves on the back a bit I’m sure. We also talk about the AL East and NL West races (we’ve officially moved the Braves back into the NL West for the next week.

Still a lot of great baseball left before the playoffs.

The headline says it all. We take a look at the NFL after three weeks — including the Braylon Edwards situation, if fans of the NFL (and Jets) should or shouldn’t be upset that he played this week and how that translates to the morality surrounding the stellar play of Michael Vick. Is it or isn’t it okay to cheer for someone inside the lines even if we find them to be reprehensible outside the lines. And how does this impact our fantasy teams?

We also run down the amazing races in MLB.

And oh yes, Dexter is back. We talk about some other premieres we’ve watched before ruining the season premiere for you with a few notes and comments. If you haven’t watched yet, skip the last six minutes until you do.

Thanks for listening. I hate you too, Monday.

Diana Klochkova of National Football Post is my next opponent in the Blogger Fantasy League. And now she must die. Seriously, I’ve lost by less than three points TOTAL this season, yet sit at 0-2 for my Team Gillette squad, going up against Diana’s Team Febreeze offering. She. Must. Die. But first…we talk about her [...]

Craig Calcaterra from NBC’s baseball blog HardballTalk joins the show to talk about the race to the playoffs. We taped the show on Wednesday afternoon, before the Phillies swept the Braves, so there would have been a bit more rubbing in than I did had I known the outcome of last night’s game (he’s a [...]

Nick and I talk about the Twins completely running away with the AL Central and take a look at the standings now when compared to July 23rd when the Twins were three back in their division, the Phillies were seven back in theirs and the Reds were half a game back in theirs. A lot [...]

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. . 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?”

We recap the NFL’s week two and take a look at some of the surprises in the league. Did anyone think the Cowboys would be 0-2 and the Dolphins would be 2-0? There are a lot of surprises, and a lot of hindsight is 20-20 “how did we not see this coming” things. For example: [...]

Each week, I’ll be chatting with a member of the Blogger Fantasy League to talk a little trash, learn about their work and talk about issues in our industry. This week, I play against Phil Van der Vossen of Gunaxin.com. As he calls it, Gunaxin is “stuff for guys” from sports to girls to games [...]