It’s an interesting phenomenon.  Plenty of sports bloggers exhibit a level of homerism toward a particular team, but our good humor and (usual) level of detachment betrays the passionate, teeth-grinding nature of many of the sports fans who read us.

Are we saving our emotional investments toward arenas that we feel are worthy of it, even if we overstep our implied job descriptions?  It seems so, because over the past few months, the majority of the most sober, convicted, and transparently passionate posts in the world of sports blogging have centered around this year’s Presidential election.  We shoe-horn political discourse into our blogs whenever the opportunity presents itself.  If Barack Obama is asked about his basketball background in a television interview, or if Barack Obama dribbles a basketball anywhere at any time, or if any athlete wonders aloud what it would be like if Barack Obama were to dribble a basketball, it is optioned and dissected by half the American sports bloggers on the Internet.

The results are mixed.  For example, this guy re-invents himself as some sort of self-engrossed defeatist jerk hole.  Everyone’s an expert, huh, Junior?  On the other hand, there’s the informed, introspective, and sometimes angry discussion happening at Free Darko, ranging from the indulgent and entertaining (the playoff of political figures), to the analagous and surprisingly accurate (Tom Ziller’s likening of sports leagues to levels of politics), to the unapologetic anger (Shoals’ post of despair).

For the most part, I don’t have a problem with sports bloggers indulging themselves and their readers by shifting into occasional political content.  They aren’t beholden to the job description they’ve assigned themselves, and if the readership welcomes it, there isn’t a problem with it.  Rather, I’m curious: why are we sports bloggers so ready and willing to capitalize on the opportunity to write things that aren’t sports-related?

I don’t think it’s simply a matter of giving the readers what they want to read.  A lot of sports bloggers are more than just sports bloggers, they’re talented (sometimes supremely talented) writers.  Sports writing was a means for them to find their necessary niche, but we aren’t one-trick ponies — for example, I can blog about sports and make sports players yell cusses; a true renaissance man am I.  I’m not trying to glorify sports bloggers as misunderstood wunderkinds, cubbyholed and made to dance like marionettes by the cruel system we work in; I’m only attempting to speculate on why we’re so ready to blog about politics.  And so far, the readership seems largely receptive and accommodating.  We just need to be careful that we don’t expire our readers’ collective patience, so that once the election is over, we can spend the rest of it segueing our content into whatever else we find amusing.  I, for one, plan on transmogrifying sports stories into discussions of chess theory and Modest Mouse lyrics.

As an aside: I haven’t performed any official canvassing, but I am certain that Barack Obama is going to net 95 percent of the sports blogging demographic this November.  I’m grateful, because if someone like Shoals or Daulerio or Shanoff adopted a Libertarian stance and began shrieking at length about Ron Paul and the infallible gold standard, I would throw my modem out the window.