Mike Celizic

Before the advent of passenger jets, baseball teams traveled by train, and the sportswriters traveled with them. Both baseball writer and baseball player had similar incomes, so they got to know each other pretty well.

One day during a Yankee road trip, the peace on board was shattered when Babe Ruth came flying through the car stark naked. Not far behind him was an enraged woman who had not taken the time to dress properly brandishing a knife.

As the Babe ran past the beat writers, who were staring with some surprise, because this was unusual, even by Ruth’s liberal standards, he had the presence of mind to tell them, “You didn’t see this.”

The next day’s newspapers didn’t carry a single word suggesting anyone did anything on that train ride but eat, sleep and discuss the philosophy of Wittgenstein. And even as the story made the rounds of the writers, who were sure to share such a hilarious tale over their evening libations, not one ever repeated it in print.

It didn’t appear in the contemporaneous books about Ruth or the numerous magazine pieces written about him on a monthly basis. It didn’t get to the general public at all until years after his death when serious biographies were finally written about baseball’s most legendary figure.

Obviously, times have changed. Some feel they’ve changed too much. The line between a player’s private life and public life that once was as unassailable as the Himalayas is now barely a wrinkle in the carpet.

Or so it seems, especially lately when Alex Rodriguez’s personal life and mortally wounded marriage are daily fodder in the New York tabloids. The stories have two effects. One is to sell newspapers and satisfy a public whose appetite for prurience is never sated. The other is to spawn a flurry of self-critical asking the question: “Have we gone too far?” It is not uncommon for these stories to appear in the same publications that published the original salacious information.

What has changed between Ruth’s day and even that of Mickey Mantle is the status of the people involved. In Ruth’s day, he made more than any other ballplayer, but there were superstar writers like Grantland Rice who syndicated nationally and paid like network anchors are today. And the average player earned about the same salary as the ink-stained wretches who covered them. Indeed, ballplayers and writers lived in the same neighborhoods, hung out at the same bars, shopped at the same grocery stores. They also traveled together and stayed in the same hotels together.

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Sharing transportation ended in the 1970s and 80s, about the same time sharing social status ended. Today, the average writer may not make even 5 percent of what the average ballplayer makes, and even the most highly paid writer doesn’t earn more than a percent or two of what the most highly paid athlete does.

With economic separation comes social separation. Ballplayers don’t hang out with writers anymore. They hang out with other stars. And if you don’t really know a person that well, you’re not nearly as likely to cut him a break if he crosses the line.

The players treat the media like dirt, so it’s only natural they’re going to get it back. It’s like the old adage says: Don’t get in a fight with someone who buys his ink by the barrel.

We keep saying that athletes are entertainers, and that’s what they have become. That means they’re treated the same way movie stars are. Hollywood gossip rags have been around forever. The only difference now is that the gossip goes out on the Internet and is published in slick magazines and the definition of celebrity has expanded significantly.

But it’s not no-holds-barred. It is still very rare to find a superstar’s peccadilloes exposed in print. The reality is that an awful lot of players fool around — maybe the majority of them. It’s a fact of life. You get young men high on testosterone and beer and surrounded at every turn by gorgeous and willing women, you’re going to have hanky panky. And you almost never read about it. You probably never will, nor should you.

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Roger Clemens, the stories would have us believe, has been fooling around for years, and there had to be a lot of people in the media who knew about it. But as long as he didn’t do it in public and it didn’t affect his play, nobody said anything. It only came out once he put his credibility on the line with his testimony before Congress about steroids. Once he held himself up as a moral exemplar, he was painting a target on his back. He didn’t get what was coming to him as much as he got what he asked for.

But Clemens shows that there has to be a reason to expose a player’s private faults. This isn’t politics, where the only reason needed is the opportunity to ruin a rival’s career. There are still standards in sports.

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If there has been a case where a media outlet went over the imaginary line, it was last year when The New York Post sent a photographer and reporter to tail A-Rod in Toronto and then ran the pictures of him with a woman who was not his wife. I’m guessing The Post decided that A-Rod put himself above even his fellow superstars and invited the scrutiny. He also held himself up as holier than everyone, and that’s never a good attitude to project, not in a town that is the center of the media world.

But the Madonna stories are not out of line at all. No one goes to Madonna’s pad without knowing that it’s going to be noticed. And both A-Rod and Madonna know it. They’ve no call to complain.

The better question to ask is: “Why do we care?”

The answer is probably because we value the lives of other people more than our own. That seems to be in our genes. The average person has always been interested in gossip. The reason we have newspapers at all is because the village got too big and life too complicated for the average person to keep up on what the big shots were doing. And news that relates to famous and important people and what they’re doing is still a major part of every news publication or broadcast.

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Our coverage of ballplayers hasn’t changed as much as our perception of them has. We still cut them enormously wide berths and plenty of breaks. But when they start earning rock-star money and running around with entourages and saying hello by appointment only, they set themselves up to be toppled from their pedestals.

A player like A-Rod or Roger Clemens has enormous name recognition. He makes piles of money endorsing products. He has public relations consultants to tell him how to dress, how to talk, how to act. He’s more like a movie star than a ballplayer. That he’s being treated like a movie star in the media shouldn’t be surprising.

Nor should it be considered excessive. It’s the rent he has to pay for the position he occupies.