This season, as in every season, there are players having fantastic seasons to little notice and less acclaim. It would seem that the advent of the Internet, cable packages allowing fans to watch out-of-town games, satellite radio, and the like would lead to a broader distribution of fame among players, and to some extent it has, but there are also opposing tendencies.

The mass of available information is so great that it’s necessary to screen out a great deal of it, and the inverse relation between the amount of information to which one is exposed and the amount one retains has an effect, too. Rather than 100 outlets covering 100 stories, or 100 outlets taking 100 angles on one story, we have 100 outlets talking about two or three stories. That’s still better than three or four outlets talking about one story — it wasn’t so long ago that you had ESPN, the Sporting News, your local paper, and talk radio, all wrongly pointing out that Terry Pendleton deserved the MVP award over Barry Bonds — but it’s still a bit disappointing.

What can be especially frustrating are the seemingly arbitrary reasons for one player or team being covered extensively, rather than another. Take Josh Johnson, for instance, and his 2.52 ERA.There’s a fair chance you’ve never heard of the National League ERA leader, who’s a big part of why the Florida Marlins, in a season in which they have a $14 million payroll, had a better record than the Braves, Cubs, and Phillies, and the same record as the defending National League champion Astros, entering play last night.

The reasons aren’t mysterious — early in the year, with the stunning, historic success of Boston’s Jonathan Papelbon, Detroit’s Justin Verlander, and Minnesota’s Francisco Liriano, it became clear that one of the season’s narratives was the success of American League rookie pitchers on strong teams. Johnson, a 22-year-old rookie, is a natural addition to the story in obvious ways, but an unnatural one in others.

Unlike those three, for one thing, he was anything but a blue chip prospect coming up through the minors; for another, he only grabbed a rotation slot in May, and unlike Liriano wasn’t a dominant bullpen presence before that; and there are no comparably successful National League peers with which to group Johnson. Had Mike Pelfrey come out of the minors and rung up a sub-3.00 ERA over his first several games, for instance, you’d doubtless have seen a whole group of stories on the National League’s answer to the American League’s young guns, but he didn’t, and you haven’t.

Or, to take another example, look at Cleveland center fielder Grady Sizemore. Last year, he established himself as one of the really bright young players in the game, batting .289 AVG/.348 OBA/.484 SLG with 22 steals and reasonable defense for an excellent team that, despite missing the playoffs by a hair, looked to be on the cusp of a dynasty. This year, he hasn’t had nearly the attention, mainly because Cleveland, despite scoring runs and preventing them roughly as well as the Red Sox have, is 13 games under .500.

Still Sizemore has established himself as a young superstar on the order of David Wright — he’s batting .305/.389/.528 with 17 steals in 19 attempts and is playing strong defense. That’s MVP level performance, and coming from someone who turns 24 today, it looks like what we’ve seen with Wright — the rare case of a player who performs at a star level from a young age and then actually reaches a new level. Cleveland isn’t New York, and it’s not surprising that Wright would get so much more press — but shouldn’t there be a bit more room for hype of a player ready to take his place among the absolute best in the game?

This is a rhetorical question, of course, and the cases of Johnson and Sizemore point to one of the less-noted facts about our vastly democratized age of electronic whizbangery, which is that it isn’t all that democratized after all. In fact, the trend in baseball coverage is toward increasing centralization.

Major broadcast outlets like ESPN and Fox Sports, probably the most powerful purveyors of baseball analysis and insight, are Major League Baseball broadcast partners and have a vested interest in promoting large, central, and attention-grabbing themes that can be used to promote the season.

MLB’s Web site is even more conflicted, of course, but is ever-increasingly vital in shaping the narrative of the season. Independent, nationalscale coverage is probably a bit rarer now than it used to be, if anything — certainly there’s no equivalent to the old Sporting News around these days. All of this has both its good and its bad points, but there’s something missing today, and the electronic equivalent of a thousand different sports bar conversations, even very well informed ones, is not going to make up for it at all.

tmarchman@nysun.com