Dear CNN,

I know figuring out ways to fill airtime is hard.

I know you’re going to resort to ripping off other news organizations and muddle through giving them credit for those stories.

And certainly, this great opinion piece by the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins about horse racers breeding irresponsibly in search for speed beyond anything else is worthy of mention. The Gazette ran a copy of it this morning in the sports section.

But I have a couple of concerns:

According to several estimates, there are 1.5 career-ending breakdowns for every 1,000 racing starts in the United States. That’s an average of two per day.

That’s a crazy statistic, but it doesn’t need to be inflated. So no, Don Lemon, 1.5 is not “almost two” as you say. It’s 1.5. Even for extremely large values of 1.5.

And was it really necessary to drag an expert out of his California bed in the middle of the night so he could be interviewed on an east-coast morning show with a pitch-black racetrack behind him? Have you no sympathy?