Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times writes that troubled Mariners’ outfielder Milton Bradley has pondered suicide following years of stress and frustration stemming from baseball.

The answer was simple. For the last two years, since he first came back from a torn ACL in his knee, suffered late in the 2007 season when he fell while arguing with an umpire, Bradley has been allowing “unpleasant thoughts” into his head. Thoughts about what? Well, sometimes suicide.

“When you start feeling that the only way you can end it is to kill yourself, that’s not a healthy feeling,” Bradley said of the constant negativity and anxiety that surrounded him. “So, I needed to get away, to step back for a bit. There are too many people I care about in this world to let things go down that road.”

Now, obviously that’s an attention-getter right there. It’s what folks will be talking about in the street tomorrow. But it’s only part of what Bradley wanted to convey. This doesn’t mean he was about to end his life. What it does mean is that Bradley, as a man who does an awful lot of thinking and put quite a bit of thought into the answers he gave me this morning, began pondering the merits of suicide. He told his wife that he could understand why people chose to end their lives. Not that he was about to rush out and do it himself. But that he could sympathize with their feelings. And that’s not a good thing. To be so unhappy that suicide begins to look like a reasonable alternative.

Sometimes we all get caught up in the actions of an athlete and forget that they’re all human. I’m guilty of this too; I see a headline and think to myself, “Well, that’s just Milton Bradley – he’s crazy.” But it takes an article like this to really put things into perspective.

Athletes are paid an enormous amount of money to play a game. But with that money comes stress and the pressure to succeed on a consistent basis. In today’s world, the media has access to everything so these athletes’ private lives are often on full display. That only leads to more pressure and stress, and as a human being I only hope that these athletes can deal with these circumstances.

Here’s hoping Bradley gets the serious help he needs.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

Milton Bradley is dealing with some rough issues these days. Apparently the poor guy feels as though he just has to accept his “bad guy” imagine in baseball.

From ESPN.com:

“If I was a musician, I’d be Kanye West. If I was in the NBA, I’d be Ron Artest,” the 31-year-old former Expo, Indian, Dodger, Athletic, Padre, Ranger and Cub said this week. “In baseball, they’ve got Milton Bradley. I’m that guy. You need people like me, so you can point your finger and go, ‘There goes the bad guy.”

Here’s that “bad guy,” ejected twice in three Mariners spring games last week. The first ejection remains a joke to Bradley. He disagreed with another called third strike, then umpire Dan Bellino thought Bradley gave a demonstration immediately afterward at the plate.

Bradley thought it was the third out, and said he was one move into taking off his batting glove to prepare to play the field.

“Never dropped my glove. I pulled one strap off my glove, like this,” Bradley said, pulling off the velcro strap on his batting glove. “But if you read the paper, it will say I removed my gloves. It’s exaggerated, because that’s what the media does, you know? I pulled one strap.

I don’t think I would be exaggerating if I wrote that Bradley played like crap in Chicago last year. In fact, if I were Lou Piniella I would have rather had a trash bin out in right field last year instead of Bradley. At least the trash bin can’t forget how many outs there are in an inning.

I agree with Cubs’ GM Jim Hendry when he said that Bradley should take a look in the mirror and stop blaming everyone else for his problems. Perception is reality and no matter how much Bradley thinks the media is out to get him, its not. The media wants a story and Bradley provides one with his behavior. If he stopped acting like an overgrown child then the media would stop treating him like one.

Photo from fOTOGLIF