It’s sad when baseball can’t be what it is, a game to enjoy, especially during the World Series, without the ugly journalistic hand of left-wing political bias being injected into what is our national pastime.

However, when you write for Sports Illustrated and SI is the sports arm of CNN there is always room for a left-wing media slap at Gov. Sarah Palin the GOP VP candidate in the lead of a story about the Tampa Bay Rays losing to the Philadelphia Phillies in game three of the World Series.

Here is Jon Heyman, SI sports reporter, wearing his political leanings on his sleeve in the lead of game three of the World Series:

“The feel-good Tampa Bay Rays got a rude awakening here late Saturday night and early Sunday morning much ruder than even VP hopeful/hockey mom Sarah Palin received when she dropped the first puck here at a Flyers game to a chorus of boos a couple weeks back.”

Now in the reporting of this game, which was rain-delayed, started late on Saturday and didn’t finish until early today, there is no plausible reason, other than Heyman being tired  and what his sub-conscious conjured up in his own mind, for Sarah Palin being injected into the lead of this sports story.

It wasn’t until paragraph 6 that we found out that the Phillies beat the Rays 5-4.

Sports journalism at its best.

This form of journalism is what takes place on CNN as was demonstrated this week by Drew Griffin, who in an interview with Sarah Palin, referenced and distorted a National Review article for his own left-wing political bias in asking a question that did not reflect the tone of the article.

This week the Pew Research center’s Project for Excellence in journalism said that a study it conducted showed, “In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three to one.”

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed.  A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%) while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive.

Now if it is fair for Heyman to reach into politics to report on sports I would like to give him some more analogies to work into his leads for the rest of his World Series reporting:

• The nefarious associations of Obama with the likes of: William Ayers, Weather Underground terrorist and Pentagon bomber; Rev. Jeremiah Wright who blessed America by calling it, “God Damn America”; Rashid Khalidi, a former spokesperson for Yasser Arafat’s PLO; Tony Rezko, a felon who helped Obama with the purchase of real estate; and the organization ACORN, who Obama worked with and counseled and who made contributions to and is being investigated by the FBI for voter fraud.
• And furthermore, while you are looking for analogies to work into your sports’ stories check out why William Ayers was wearing a Red Star on his shirt in a recent non-committal interview that Bill O’Reilly’s staff was trying to obtain?
• Perhaps you can also work in a Joe the Plumber analogy about Obama’s Marxist philosophy of spreading the wealth of overpaid ballplayers among those less fortunate and with less talent?

Now it is understandable that many of the left wing persuasion would like to focus on the current economic crisis — real estate, financial, global recession — I would suggest that sports reporters as well as the citizen at large focus on character and character associations before casting aspersions through sports analogies on the alternative.  For after all, I’m more concerned about Obama’s scary relationships, his lack of judgment, his lack of experience as a leader or executive prowess, than I am about his philosophy of,’spreading the wealth.’

I would like to cast my anchor to the windward.