As if 2021 weren't bad enough, the White Sox experience was about to get exponentially worse. As the team makes its heel turn, we'll explore the real time experience a fandom's divorce from their team. It's ugliness in full bloom, and there's nothing winning about it.

They were contenders, and likable ones at that. Until...

In this episode, we'll explore how owner Jerry Reinsdorf went rogue on his organization by attempting to rectify what he considered a nearly 35-year-old personnel mistake. We'll examine the error of attempting to turn back time, and its fallout - not only what it cost the team's chances to be perennial World Series contenders, but what Reinsdorf himself thought of both the fans and the players they had been rooting for.

Want to know why men, women, boys and girls are madly cheering for their team and all you see is laundry? This is how I fell in love, not just with baseball, but with the Chicago White Sox. For two decades, I lived the ups and downs, glory and tragedy, and saw someone step into immortality, it allowed me to smile, to hope, to dream.

But how do you deal with your first love doing something irredeemable?

In part one of this three-part love story, the boy who falls in love with the team, making it all the more difficult for the man to divorce himself from the fan/team marriage decades down the road.

On this episode, we'll take a deep dive into how and why Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback who's arguably the best player in Green Bay Packer history, is the same guy the team can't wait to let go.

Listen as we take a look at his 18-year one-man dramatic production-slash-revenge tour to prove that everyone who overlooked or passed him by was actively, egregiously wrong in their judgment, and how that has led him to commit the sins of the elder he hated most.

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The transcript is available here.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contact me at [email protected], and follow me on LinkedIn.

Rules? Where we're going there are no rules. For world number one men's tennis player Novak Djokovic, it has been as startling a descent over the past three years as it was an ascent for the previous decade-plus. How did such a great sportsman, once a poor kid who grew up in a a war-torn nation hitting tennis balls or shrapnel blasted tennis courts become a caricature of the worst kind of self-obsessed, sanctimonious, hypocritical, rules don't apply to me, sports celebrity?

We'll take a look at his high-speed plummet from athlete to admire to the unfortunate non-role model he's become, and examine how his Big Four contemporaries stack up by comparison. For Novak Djokovic, it's a bad look all around even if he may well currently be the best men's tennis player ever. 

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contact me at [email protected]. Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

To read the background material and research for this episode, go to:

BBC - Novak Djokovic: Doubts over timing of Covid test

The Guardian - The unapologetic feminism that turned Andy Murray into a global icon

San Francisco Chronicle - Novak Djokovic's Olympic meltdown shows hypocrisy of his Simone Biles criticism

You can't walk through this world without stepping on a few feet. You can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs. 

If you can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen. Okay, but what if there's nothing left in the kitchen but the bad apples that spoil the whole bunch?

On this season, a look at those bad apples in sports, why they're rotten to the core, and what to do about them. 

When Charles Barkley made a Nike ad saying athletes shouldn't be role models, he took heat from all sides. But maybe he had a point. Not all athletes are or should be role models, and when we're looking for stars to emulate, we should always be operating with an attitude of buyer beware.

That's this season on Wrecking the Toy Department. Please follow us, subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

The last shoe dropped on the relationship between Kyrie Irving and the Brooklyn Nets, as Kyrie forced his way out of Brooklyn. The first time he was introduced at Barclay Center after the trade request, he was roundly booed. It is everything he deserved on the way out, and actually, he let the Nets off the hook. They no longer have to strike the balance between on court wizardry and off court behavior that hits on every example of what you should avoid when making an expensive hire.

In this episode, we'll look at Kyrie Irving's super-speed transformation from shooting supernova to stardust ash, the guy who tells you this is where he wants to be, and that he's going to give you his all, until he decides he wants to no longer. And an examination of the lesson of buyer beware, that stature, charisma and good deeds can and will be easily undone. 

Content warning: this episode contains graphic audio of a man put in an ultimately fatal chokehold by a police officer.

Why is the War on Drugs constantly faltering or stalling out? In this episode, we'll explore why've let so many opportunities to gain the upper hand against drugs, be it cocaine in the 1980s or fentanyl and opioids over the past decade, slip through our fingers. And take a look at how Major League Baseball continues to miss the moment when national crisis and national pastime collide.

Content warning: there will be some description of a death by drug overdose

Remember when we were told drugs would cook your brain as fast as it takes to fry an egg? And then the commercial ended, almost on a dare, with, "Any questions?"  Well, here we are 35 years later and there are news headlines about fentanyl and opium deaths nearly every day.  In this episode of Wrecking the Toy Department, we'll examine the questions we should have asked long ago and why we continually go to so much effort to avoid a conversation that's been at the forefront  of our nation for more than half a century.

How do sports talk radio people react when they find out an afternoon drive host won't be going on a work trip to Las Vegas because of the possible impending birth of his child? The answer might surprise you. 

This episode will explore why even though the United States is one of just two nations in the world that doesn't provide federally mandated paid parental leave, there's still hope it will happen. And, impossible though it might seem, sports talk radio is providing that beacon of hope that men will no longer be belittled or disparaged for wanting to be dads from the moment their child is born.