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As described in yesterday’s Digest and discussed around every water cooler since, this week’s SI features excerpts from Game of Shadows, a book written by two reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle which describes with remarkable detail the alleged steroid regiment Barry Bonds followed for five years.  Since the excerpts went live in SI’s website Tuesday, the mainstream sports media has been abuzz with the book’s effect.  No surprise there - not wanting to appear scooped by a rival, the major sports news sources (Bristol, FOX, etc.) are simply playing catchup.  This is good – again echoing the Digest, we can only hope this is a trend towards better journalism.

But what about the semi-sports media – those writers who are usually devoted to making analogies between baseball and 90210, the talking heads that blow off playoff basketball to watch American Idol, only to yap about both the next day?  Despite the editorial separation between the “real” journalists and their step-siblings, you might think the semi-sports writers themselves would leave such a serious topic … significant evidence of activity by a star that is unquestionably illegal and in most people’s eyes cheating … to more devoted journalists.  You might believe that meaningful commentary is beyond the collective gr\asp of the semi-sports scribes. 

On both counts, you would probably be wrong.  It’s true that, on your average day, the semi-sports media provides only surface level analysis of sports news.  Hey, when you are devoting the majority of your column space to cheap jokes and the discussion of non-sports issues, that’s what’s likely to happen.  But on an issue like this, the semi-sports media has a chance to shine.  While the mainstream media uses its high-paid analysts to discuss the big picture, the semi-sports writers can reflect the true (and important) debate, the one that takes place among fans.

First, it’s important to note that, for fans, none of this information is particularly new.  More than four out of five denizens of SportsNation believed that Bonds was on the juice before the Shadows excerpts hit the wire – an apathy that Simmons echoes in his latest mailbag.  So it’s not as if we are talking about fans reaction to the possibility of Bonds being on steroids – most of us reached our personal conclusion on that issue long ago.

Instead, what we are facing is what effect this book has on sports as a whole.  The Daily Quickie starts to put this into context, citing figures from SportsNation polls to conclude that fans are too shocked to process the story.  While that conclusion itself is a little condescending, Shanoff brings up the right concerns from the fan perspective – not just concerns for the game, but also for their enjoyment of it.  Maybe that’s the biggest problem with this Bonds scandal – a point Kevin Hench delves into for FOX Sports as he compares Bonds to the sadly departed Kirby Puckett.  FOX’s Rob Dibble goes even further, arguing that true baseball fans don’t want to hear any more about the scandal.

But Dibble would appear to be in the minority – just because a story isn’t new, and isn’t pleasant, doesn’t mean that fans don’t want to talk about it for a little while.  So leave it to the friendly folks at Scoreboard Daily (CNN/SI’s answer to Page 2) to provide us with the historical context we need to go into the battle informed.  Adam Hofstetter provides notes that as much as sports fans love to see players and team succeed on the field, we also have a taste for schadenfreude off of it.  Mark Bechtel even goes so far as to … gasp! … read the responses of fans posted to the website, and specifically address the comparison between Bonds and Pete Rose with more than just a flip answer.  While he may have missed a few analytical points along the way, at least he took the time to consider the issue in some depth.

Bechtel isn’t alone in wanting to look at the issue in greater depth.  Back at Page 2, Bomani Jones looks at the myriad of racial issues inherent in the steroid issue as a whole.  Now, Jones isn’t alone amongst the SSM in doing this … Stephen A. Smith (surprise!) played the race card with glee on Quite Frankly last night while emphasizing that the book was little more than allegations … but, unlike Smith, Jones’ analysis is good enough that we’ll forgive him for being a Tar Heel fan.  (And in March, that’s strong amnesty.)  Jones argues that the steroids story could plague baseball’s history in the same way the game’s segregation did, by preventing us from knowing who the true best players were.  And in a sport so proud of the (legitimate) historical debates its teams and players can generate, THAT is the biggest threat this scandal poses.

Unfortunately, Jones doesn’t offer anything in the way of a solution.  This puts him in the square majority of the SSM – and it really shouldn’t be surprising.  Even when it is able to step up to the plate of real analysis, the semi-sports world is best suited for cheap shots (like the ones taken by Onion Sports), not solutions.  For example, on ESPN Radio’s The SportsBash, Erik Kuselias spent a full segment analyzing the issue, concluding that Bud Selig can do absolutely nothing.  The best solution offered came from Kornheiser on PTI (who suggests that baseball fund a full fledged investigation of the entire steroids era, not just Bonds) – who, despite recent inactivity, is far too experienced and accomplished as a sportswriter to be considered “normal” within the semi-sports realm.

While Dibble seems to be overly dismissive of the scandal in his official blog post, he’s right in one sense – fans don’t want to see the sausage being made.  One needn’t look further than the recent NFL labor negotiations for proof.  Despite the extreme importance of the proceedings for the sport and our ability to enjoy it in the long term, the vast majority of fans … and bloggers (the Digest as an exception) … and yes, SSM writers, simply couldn’t be bothered to care. 

I’m not sure this is a problem, though.  There is a simple reason that most fans don’t want to concern themselves with the dirty/business sides of sports – it’s not our job.  Our job is to tell the players, teams, and media what we care about.  Solutions?  That’s a task for the actors within the sport, and to a lesser degree, the mainstream media that they work with on a far more regular basis.  The intrepid writers for the Chronicle (and several writers before them, including those at ESPN: The Magazine last fall) have fulfilled their role to do the dirty work.  Through the semi-sports writers above (and scads of blogs and reader comments), we fans have announced our troubles with steroids on a number of levels.    Now, the only party left with a job to do are the stakeholders themselves.