Wrecking the Toy Department

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, bu...

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 irredeem...

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,...

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-obs...

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. ...

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 beha...

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 warn...

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...

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 wi...

Professional sports have shown us why the United States still has yet to enact federally mandated paid parental leave. But, could sports talk radio - known for the most lowbrow of Cro-Magnon guy talk - end up being the beacon we follow to eventually enacting just that into federal law? It's a question we'll examine as we learn why one Chicago sports talk radio host won't be joining the rest of his...

When it comes to the reasons behind the resignation of Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden, don't buy what the NFL is trying to sell you. Even though he had to go for the racism, homophobia, misogyny and sexism that ran rampant through his work emails with league executives, he was forced out for entirely the wrong reasons. His ousting came at the end of a near year-and-a-half long investigati...

The NFL can laud itself for doing the right thing in forcing Jon Gruden to resign as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders because of his racist, homophobic and mysoginistic emails. But, in this episode, we'll look at how and why the NFL did the right thing - partially - for entirely the wrong reasons - to protect a billionaire team owner. Because, in the NFL, their reputations, desires, problems must be...

Should Major League Baseball be using Field of Dreams to celebrate its sport? On top of not being a good movie, it revels in the nostalgia of a time when Blacks couldn't play baseball and women couldn't vote. Despite that, MLB's Field of Dreams game between the White Sox and Yankees was a box office smash with a pure Hollywood ending. So then, why afterwards did MLB decide to promote the 2022 Fiel...

Why is Field of Dreams the movie Major League Baseball has chosen to celebrate its sport? Sure, August's Field of Dreams game between the White Sox and Yankees was a dream game - a ratings bonanza with a Hollywood ending - but it could have been so much more. It was a moment baseball could have capitalized on to expand its fan base by putting its full marketing machine behind the sport's biggest B...

Today, Canadian boxer Mandy Bujold will learn whether or not she's headed to the Olympics. She earned the right to go, having made the Canadian team that was to participate in the Olympic qualifying tournament last year. But when it was cancelled due to Covid, the International Olympic Committee decided to qualify boxers based on their results from three tournaments in 2017 and 2018, the only thre...

Heading into what the International Olympic Committee has billed as the Gender Equity Games, Canadian boxer Mandy Bujold’s fight just to qualify for the Summer Olympics next month has served notice of how far we still need to go to achieve actual gender equity in the world. In 2017, Bujold, then ranked 8th in the world, took some time away from the sport to start a family. After an absence of 11 m...

There’s no such thing as, “just stick to sports.” To paraphrase Oscar-winning film director Spike Lee: If you read the sports section, you’ll know what’s happening in the world. Sports gets it first … Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, Megan Rapinoe, the courageous women of the WNBA… and most certainly Covid-19. The reason why March 11, 2020 is the day the coronavirus pandemic became truly real in Am...

“Florida Man” isn’t just a meme or a jokey news story including a mugshot of a white man looking like he has no idea he’s done something wrong. Personified here by newly minted Jaguars coach Urban Meyer, “Florida Man” is also a culture, one that can help explain a disturbing lack of diversity when it comes to corporate hiring practices. MUSIC CREDITS "The Sky of our Ancestors" Kevin MacLeod (incom...

Because of the courageous and heroic work of her employees, the mostly Black women who play for the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream, a team named after Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, Dream co-owner and former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler lost her re-election bid to Raphael Warnock, the pastor of the Atlanta church King once led. Loeffler’s re-election campaign and subsequent defeat has left h...

Why would the Chicago White Sox organization make the exact wrong hire at the exact wrong time? The Old Boys Club, of course. What’s that, you ask? Take a listen and learn about all the benefits this club bestows on its members. And remember, you’ll never get to be a part of it, and neither will I. Want to contact the show? Email me at jgwilliams99@gmail.com MUSIC CREDITS: "Fearless First" Kevin M...

Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott showed true leadership when he admitted to having suffered from depression and sought treatment. His story and those like his are a meaningful strike against what’s called “toxic masculinity,” the outdated notion that men should hide or otherwise cover up their vulnerabilities. A brief warning to listeners: This episode contains discussion of depression and suicide....

It's time to stop pretending that the "student" in the NCAA's student-athlete model is anywhere near as important as the 'athlete" part to those in charge. This structural imbalance in college sports has been exposed and magnified by the desire of those in charge to do everything they can to play a full college football season in the midst of a pandemic, regardless of what it might do to their pla...

Go Football Team! Yes, that's the new name of the Washington Football Team, formerly the 'Skins. On this episode, we take a look back at the team's last two decades under owner Daniel Snyder, and why the Washington football organization during that time can best be referred to as A Capital Disgrace. Content warning: there are curse words used as well as descriptions of sexual harassment in the wor...

It's on! Major League Baseball is back, but is bringing sports back in the midst of a global pandemic a good idea? Are we ready? Is professional sports ready? Or could it be that sports are the Covid cure we've been searching for all this time? Content Warning: There is a graphic interview in which someone details his own personal battle dealing with Covid-19.