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The reaction from establishment sports writers has been fierce and bizarre. In an episode of Bob Costas’s HBO show Costas Live, Pulitzer-prize winner and Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger indulged in a profane rant against deadspin.com founder Will Leitch, blaming the blogosphere for the downfall of the sports writing medium, instead of identifying its popularity as a reflection of the failure of sports writing. Costas chimed in with Bissinger, likening the blogosphere to being forced to listen to what “a cab driver” thinks about sports. In the past, Costas has called bloggers “pathetic, get-a-life losers.” His contempt is shared by many A-list sports columnists, who are quick to seethe red-faced that “some guy in his basement” gets to have equal voice, or in Leitch’s case, even exceed the popularity of the self-appointed experts. (It’s always “some guy in his basement.” Sports bloggers for some reason don’t live in apartments.)

Besides sour grapes, the most pronounced feature of the bloghaters is their ignorance, demonstrated by the constant polemic that blogs are monolithic. There are sports blogs in every style, for every team, and they have changed both the way we read and the way we understand sports.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Leitch told me. “[Before blogs] when you didn’t like your local sports columnist that was your only choice. Now there are new voices and new options… [Traditional media has] to recognize that they can’t just keep doing the things that they did and try something a little new, that’s kind of what people want.”

What infuriates sports writers are that people on the web—that contemptible cab driver—are calling them on their privilege, their isolation, and the fact that far too many are moonlighting as flacks, writing PR for teams on their BlackBerries as they rush to another TV appearance. Their inability to hold an audience has opened the door to Leitch and his ilk. The audience of bloggers, and the continued decrepitude of celebrity sports writing should signal sports sociologists that fans yearn for new ways of seeing the game.

scholarship that fills the void

If sports sociology wants to affect how we think about our sports world, it has to change how it communicates.

“It would help the business of thinking sports tremendously if sports sociology, as a discipline, would demonstrate less professional anxiety. There is too little insistence upon argument, and too much emphasis upon citation…The refusal to argue is disguised as ‘scientific research’ or just ‘science,’” said Grant Farred, a professor at Cornell University and author of Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA and Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football.

His point is well taken. There is far too little insistence on joining the fray and taking a position about the state of our sports world and too many heads in the academy. Instead, the field might consider the approach of Mary Jo Kane, who excels at using her research to make an argument and then fighting for that argument to be heard.

The sports sociologist from the University of Minnesota, who specializes in gender and sport for women, undertook a far-reaching study of images of female athletes putting their bodies on display for a wide-ranging focus group of both men and women. Kane and her research team found a very basic truth: Sex may sell magazines, but it doesn’t sell women’s sport.

“And it alienates the core of the fan base that’s already there. Women…18 to 34 and 35 to 55 are offended by these images. And older males, fathers with daughters, taking their daughters to sporting events to see their favorite female athletes, are deeply offended by these images,” she said.

As for the young men excited to see race car driver Danica Patrick in leather, spread out on a car, “they want to buy the magazines but they didn’t want to consume the sports,” she said. This should be an earth-shaking revelation for every executive in the Women’s Tennis Association, the WNBA, and the LPGA, who have for decades operated under the assumption that a little leg goes a long way.

But women’s sports, Kane argues, will need more than logic to move away from the abyss of abject objectification.

“This is deeper. This is also about what runs in the bone marrow of women’s sports, namely homophobia. They are very well meaning but they also want to distance themselves from the lesbian label…How do you do that? You reassure the viewing audiences, the corporate sponsors, the TV networks, and the female athletes themselves, that, ‘No, no, no! Sports won’t make your daughter gay.’ Women’s sports will be more acceptable if you believe, even though it is stereotypical and inaccurate, that if you are pretty and feminine in a traditional sense then you are not gay.”

But what about this individual culpability of the female athlete? What about those who say that provocative poses are about celebrating their bodies, and celebration of the body beautiful has been a part of sports since ancient Greece? Kane answers, “What muscle group do bare breasts belong to? You can show off your body without being naked in a passive, sexually provocative pose.”

This question of women’s athletics seeing “breasts as muscle groups” is about more than whether women’s sports is taking itself seriously. It’s whether universities, boosters, and donors take it seriously as well. And it is, Kane believes, about the future of college athletics.

“The end result of this is that when resources are precious, and you dole out those resources, and you don’t take women’s athletics as seriously as men, then there are tangible consequences. Athletic directors get a pass to just not take it seriously,” she said.

Kane revealed her findings not at an academic conference but at the Women’s Sports Foundation. Afterwards representatives from ESPN asked to speak further with her in the weeks to come. Whether she can make a dent in coverage is certainly to be determined. But at least she’s entering the fray and becoming a party to the debate.

Another sports scholar doing something similar is the University of Illinois historian Adrian Burgos, Jr., author of Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line.

“While those within organized sports at the national, league, or team levels tend to be most focused on and trained to look at the future development of the sport, scholars who study sport look long-range both forward and backwards over time. This produces insights into what has changed that those who look primarily at ‘growing the game’ can overlook,” said Burgos.

With this approach Burgos developed a theory about why the number of African American baseball fans and players continues to dwindle. Major League Baseball’s (MLB) attention to integration on the field came at the expense of those off the field who had shaped generations of black baseball players, he asserts. And the game for African Americans can’t be reinvigorated without a major reinvestment in black baseball.

“Within this private institution,…the process of integration remained strictly in the hands of the very same individuals who had barred blacks (and the majority of Latinos) from participating in MLB for several generations. Through their refusal to incorporate the Negro Leagues and [their] expertise at the management and ownership levels in any meaningful way, these owners basically wiped out the infrastructure of black baseball in the United States, something that would become manifest a couple of generations later,” Burgos explained.

That impact was felt for generations to come, until 1974 when Frank Robinson became the first African American manager of a major league team. But in the meantime, a generation of African American men, devoid of off-the-field opportunities at the highest levels of the game, turned their attention where they could most readily have an impact—local football and basketball.

This perspective, Burgos told me, came about after studying the history of black baseball, integration, and sports today. Together with similar work by fellow scholars Alan Klein and Milton Jamail on Latin American baseball, Major League practices in Latin America, and sport in U.S. society, the policy implications of this research have begun to influence front-office officials at several major league clubs. These new practices have the potential to transform the culture of baseball.