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Why not just stay in this moment, trading players with each other and barbs with various public officials?

The big story of the day is that the baseball players’ association agreed to Selig’s tougher steroids policy. The response from sportswriters around the country has been overwhelming and overwhelmingly positive, essentially one loud chorus of “boo-yah.” So we need to ask two questions: 1) what kinds of different questions and concerns have emerged from the media in the aftermath of the decision, and 2) why such overwhelming and one-sided interest?

John Donovan at SI takes the simple road: “this policy will all but eliminate virtually all known steroids, and many other performance-enhancing drugs, from the game.” Ooh, it sounds so easy! Wilbon’s not too far away, praising a policy “with some muscle” in today’s Post column, essentially echoing his comments on PTI that a stronger policy, even at the expense of a weaker union, is ‘good for the sport.’

It’s this relationship between Selig, the MLBPA, and Congress, that has unleashed the political analysts hiding inside so many of our favorite columnists this morning. On SportsCenter, Tim Kurkjian noted that the union essentially had no choice, that they had to comply in order to avoid congressional legislation – but that they would also not forget, and that we should expect retaliation when the next round of Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations begins (after the 2006 season). And Tim’s by no means alone; Murray Chass paints a picture of Congress hanging like the sword of Damocles over Bob Fehr, Bob Ryan says that congress (specifically ex-player Jim Bunning) just struck them out, and Tom Gatto worries similarly about the implications for CBA negotiations.

The CBA is not the only source of worry. Rosenthal thinks that we shouldn’t applaud the “wasted” Congressional hours that it took to make the deal happen. Buster Olney, who, fake-press-conference-notwithstanding, still has about as much journalistic credibility as anybody working for Bristol, says that the policy is too late: the numbers are already tainted and always will be.

Meanwhile, the particular tenets of the ban raised flags with a number of reporters, especially the amphetamine ban, which adds an additional level of scrutiny. Selena Roberts says that the amphetamine ban changes the GM game once again: “it’s Michael Lewis’s ‘Moneyball’ meets John McCain’s ‘hardball.’” Scott Miller wants the policy extended for HGH as well, which would make it as comprehensive a substance ban as the one in place in the NFL.

Finally, Jon Heyman, one of the first to break the story yesterday, writes today about the various ways of sneaking past mandatory drug tests. The folks at Deadspin have picked up on this one, tracking down Heyman’s source and having some fun with him (we won’t spoil the punchline, except that it involves the phrase "Nobody can tell that you are tripping till you tell them 'I’m tripping.'").

There’s an underlying chorus here, and it’s the one that ties MLB and the NFL together: strong, centralized ownership works in the best interest of the game, and players’ unions are a threat to the stability of the sport itself. This is a huge part of the rhetoric behind T.O.’s public trial, and will be hugely influential in coverage of the new NFL CBA as it happens this season.

Certainly ownership/union negotiations in professional sports are the most visible union negotiations in America today. And while this argument needs considerably more space and attention, it’s worth suggesting that this is just another important reason to pay attention to how sports media twist and influence the way that we think about sports and sports culture: sports media have a huge role to play in how our culture thinks about the global relationship between labor and management. Just another reason to read Sports Media Watch.

Two Baseball Stories Which are Not About the Sox and Yanks

Except, of course, that they are.

First: Albert Pujols is the NL MVP. Which, apparently, isn’t controversial at all. Jayson Stark says it’s a good move, and Scott Miller says he’s the next Barry Bonds, and going to the Hall of Fame, so winning an MVP seems okay. It’s worth pointing out that Pujols’ margin of victory over Andruw Jones was just as slight as A-Rod’s victory over Ortiz, and yet, somehow… well, nobody’s yelling. At least not very loudly.

The only controversy involved here stems from shake-ups in the pool of eligible MVP voters. Apparently certain sports sections have forced MVP-voting reporters on their staff to recuse themselves from voting, fearful of being labeled as “part of the story.” In Atlanta, two reporters dropped from the MVP voting registrar, which presumably did Atlanta’s Jones no favors in the final tally.

The Digest fully approves of the motivation here: for as much criticism as Bristol gets in these pages for producing the story instead of reporting the story, we could hardly critique attempts to bypass this conflict. On the other hand, any number of sports rankings are explicitly based on journalists’ opinions: NCAA football and basketball rankings/seedings, including the BCS, any number of professional sports awards, etc. There’s a difference between explicitly-proclaimed journalistic involvement and the kind of “What, me journalist?” attitude that Bristol wakes up with every day.

If all journalists who worried about conflict of interest recused themselves from award voting, we wouldn’t have any awards. Or they’d all just be based on ESPN online polls.

Those aren’t happy choices.

Second: The Dodgers have hired Ned Colletti as their new GM. Presumably this move was done to generate as little public notice as possible. They could have made waves with a PC-hire, or gone for the Epstein media blitzkrieg, but instead they just got themselves a baseball dude, which, for Rosenthal and Bill Plashke, is all there is to say.

Which might explain why nobody else is talking about it.

(The Digest defies any of you to read the Plashke piece and convey, in ten words or less, his opinion. Thesis statements, people. Thesis statements).

As Promised

Yesterday, the Digest promised a recap of MLS Cup coverage. Here it is:

Somebody won.

We think they were from L.A.

SportsCenter did about thirty seconds, mostly about how Bob Kraft was there. The end.

As the Digest has suggested, ESPN’s new deal with FIFA should massively increase Bristol’s soccer coverage over the next decade. But not today.