The Kansas City Star’s Joe Posnanski is one of the most gifted figures in sports journalism, and it could even be argued that he may be the single most universally respected. He posted a piece on his blog yesterday that’s too indecisive to be a tome of any sort, but he asks the sort of questions about sportswriting that are pertinent not only to sportswriters, but to anyone who reads them. His primary question is this: is sports reporting supposed to be so much like news reporting? The money quote:

But I believe too that sportswriting has shifted on its own. There is still great, great sportswriting being done in newspapers, I believe this with all my heart. But that professional thing — maybe in places, there is a lack of joy. Maybe in places, there is an honorable distance. Maybe in places, the professional skepticism that we have built up through the years turns our coverage of games into hard-nosed city hall reporting. And last I checked, nobody wears jerseys that say “City Hall” on them.

Homerism, poor ethical decisions and the like certainly carry their consequences when committed by sports writers, but as Tom Boswell once put it, sports serve as a reprieve from “big issues and heart surgery.” If a journalist applies poor ethics to sports, a player can be defamed. But if he or she applies poor ethics to political reporting, or war, or social issues, the consequences are capable of devastating people. Sports are small potatoes relative to the real world.

That said, fans usually require established context to fully enjoy sports. They want to know what they are watching. For instance, apart from my tiresome, but earnest, “think of the children” argument, my real issue with performance-enhancing drugs in baseball was that I would watch it and ask, “What exactly am I watching? Are they all playing on the level? How many are cheating?” Speaking strictly in terms of my ability to enjoy baseball, I would have been fine with PED use as long as they were all doing it; that the playing field was even. I needed context to fully appreciate the game.

The ethical quality of sports journalism, logically, cannot be more important than sports. Sportswriting doesn’t have to be a promotional vehicle for sports, and it doesn’t have to be a vociferous exercise in keeping sports honest. I’d argue that journalism should serve as the track to the sports world’s locomotive — two separate entities that are mutually dependent. The sports world will go where it’s going to go; journalism is there to make sure it doesn’t fall off.