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Here's a new definition of "the good old days" when sports didn't make news until games actually occurred.

Nowadays scores seem to be the least of it. It takes a whole newspaper, not just an ex-jock, to cover sports action.

• Economics reporter (figures present-day value of deferred contracts).

• Washington correspondent (attends steroid hearings).

• Police reporter for the pros (hockey assaults, bullpen attacks, general indictments).

• Police reporter for amateurs (Tracking college recruiting abuses is a full-time job.)

What's wrong? One thing, say some: money. As television and sponsorships pour cash into sports, the pressure to perform increases exponentially. That pressure moves down the sports system, all the way to youth league fields.

"It's hard to tell whether the problem [with sports] is with the pros or with the kids and parents who want to reach the pros," says Doug Abrams, a law professor at the University of Missouri and a 35-year youth hockey coach. "[To get a pro contract or scholarship] is almost like an arms race, and I suspect the steroid problem in high school sports is worse than people make it out to be."

OK, so maybe it isn't a news flash that big bucks are warping sports. And what's happening in baseball, say, isn't all that far from some of the problems in US corporate culture at large.

Insiders at ImClone were trying to pocket cash by dumping their stock before bad news about the company became public. A baseball player using steroids - and 5 to 7 percent tested positive for steroids last year - is similarly trying to gain an edge by traveling beyond the bounds of legal behavior.

Baseball is one of two sports - hockey being the other - that fared particularly poorly this week. Wednesday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing on drug-testing seemed designed to pressure the baseball players' union into accepting tougher policies. Without such policies, the sport is in danger of becoming a "fraud," said Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona.

Yet players' union chief Donald Fehr demurred, saying that at the very least that was a matter he would not negotiate in the glare of klieg lights. He deflected the senators' assaults despite a poll of players taken last year that showed that upwards of 80 percent would accept tougher steroid standards.

Is baseball at a crossroads? Maybe. Lawmakers have always felt freer to lecture baseball to change its ways, due to its historic prominence in American life, and the fact that it is exempt from federal antitrust laws. In the past, Congress has weighed in on everything from baseball's periodic strikes to the lack of a team in Washington.

Plus, the criminal investigation into the activities of the BALCO trainers cooperative in San Francisco continues to grind away, and may produce damaging evidence even if a fickle Congress loses interest.

"Every other sport has a [steroid] policy in place that seems effective," says Peter Roby, director of Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society. "Baseball is really at a crossroads because it goes to the heart of the integrity of the game if people don't feel that what they are seeing on the field is natural and fair."

But the baseball players' union is far and away the most powerful such organization in sports. And the vast majority of the public outrage may be coming from people who think "slugging percentage" refers to on-field fights.

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