So, Does Anybody REALLY Care About Jose Canseco And Alex Rodriguez?

So something interesting happened yesterday, in the wake of all those Canseco stories. The "mainstream" sports world went nuts — poor Joe Lavin, the guy who bought the book, found his name on the freaking ESPN crawl — but you guys, the actual sports fans out there, responded with shoulder shrugs and collective yawns. We found this telling.

We've been arguing for the last couple of months, to anyone who will listen, that sports fans are so exhausted of the whole steroid "scandal" that they just don't care about it anymore. Yesterday was further proof of that. Alex Rodriguez and Jose Canseco have drifted into what we called in the book "The Nancy Grace Zone." The postulate states that when a sports story reaches the cable news channels, it immediately becomes a story that actual sports fans no longer care about. This has happened to the steroid story. We remember watching the "NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams" — yes, we're 94 years old — the day Roger Clemens played his famous phone call with Brian McNamee. It was the third story on the national news broadcast, after the presidential election and before the war. We had literally received one email about the call all day. People who take the time to read a sports blog all day, actual sports fans, could not care less. The steroid mess is for the casual, just-peek-in-every-once-in-a-while fan.

Which, we think, bodes poorly for the current state of "mainstream" sports journalism. They're freaking out over stories that, frankly, their core customer doesn't really care about all that much. But good luck finding substantial fantasy baseball coverage in your local newspaper.

This is just a theory, and a somewhat half-cocked one ... but yesterday, when we were doing our Canseco due-diligence, we felt like we were kind of going through the motions, researching a story that only media people really care about. Yes, yes, we're all supposed to be fired up that Alex Rodriguez was mentioned as a steroid user in Jose Canseco's book. Right? Right? So where are all the emails? Anybody out there?

Nope. Most emails were about the Red Sox-A's game, Pac Man Jones and beer taps at your table. We couldn't agree with you more.