Something unusual took place in Louisville, Ky., on Sunday. Reporter Brian Bennett had his press credential pulled in the fifth inning of an NCAA baseball game for posting live updates at his blog. As you’d expect, this quickly became a minor cause célèbre. NCAA officials protested that they were just trying to enforce exclusivity terms of their broadcast contract; Bennett dryly noted that “someone watching ESPN across the street could have blogged every single pitch without a problem.”

Neither side, of course, is wrong. That’s part of the issue, but the bigger issue, and the reason this drew as much notice as it did, is that while press types have been fretting about how the Web will destroy newspapers for years now, no one in sports has any real idea what to do about bloggers. The NCAA got to play the role of villain this weekend, but Major League Baseball will get to play that role soon enough if it doesn’t arrive at a credible policy for dealing with journalists who publish online.

The problem, such as it is, is that the structure of baseball coverage hasn’t really changed in a century. In 1908, baseball writers founded the Baseball Writers Association of America, a trade group that negotiated unified rules for access so that writers could cover the sport. Naturally enough, given the technology of the time, it was a group for and of newspaper reporters, and that hasn’t changed since. Because reporters from other news outlets haven’t formed comparable groups, one general effect of the system as it stands is that life is easier for newspaper reporters, even those like me who aren’t BBWAA members. If I call a team explaining that I write for The New York Sun, they’ll leave a credential at the gate; if I call explaining that I write for a Web site, they’ll ask me a few more questions, and some will tell me to buy a ticket.

After a century, this setup is starting to show its age. It’s predicated on the somewhat archaic notion that newspaper writers are a class apart, deserving of special treatment others don’t receive, because they’ve been vetted by newspaper editors and thus presumably have qualifications and an audience, and can be held accountable for their coverage. If you were designing a system from scratch, I don’t think you’d do it this way.

The people who deserve special privileges are the beat reporters who cover teams day in and day out. In practice, virtually everyone who does this works either for a team-affiliated organization like an official Web site or for a newspaper, and so a system designed to make life easier for people who work for newspapers basically works out pretty well, but there are all sorts of obvious inequities here, both real and potential. There’s no arrangement, for instance, guaranteeing a writer for Baseball Prospectus access to a ballgame, whereas a writer for the Final Call, if he had a BBWAA card, could waltz right in despite working for smaller, less credible outlet. In practice, writers for established online outlets generally won’t have problems getting access they legitimately need to, but their arrangements are tenuous and insecure, and that’s probably not fair.

This gets a lot stickier when you start thinking through what sort of formal arrangement baseball could make to guarantee credible online reporters access. The virtue of privileging newspaper reporters, after all, is that it makes for an objective criterion: You either work for a newspaper or you don’t. To give online reporters a formal access arrangement would entail inherently arbitrary judgments. Dave Cameron of ussmariner.com, for instance, is about as insightful and credible a writer on the game as anyone presently working; someone who makes a real contribution to baseball. He clearly deserves at least as much consideration as Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times, who doesn’t cover the sport fulltime or, honestly, with anything like Cameron’s understanding. How, though, can you guarantee rights for Cameron without opening up the press box to any clown with a blogspot.com account? You can’t, without judging the quality of the work various writers are doing, and a process of judgment is clearly open to stupidity and abuse.

Nonetheless, baseball needs to address this issue; leaving it to team PR departments to address on an ad hoc basis is going to leave baseball behind the curve on exploiting the growth of online media, an area in which the sport has generally been a leader.

I don’t have a grand plan for solving the problem, but as a first suggestion it might be a good idea to start hashing out a league-wide policy differentiating reporters on the basis of the work they do, rather than on the basis of where that work is published. Cameron and Mariotti have needs in common, and they’re different from the needs of someone who travels to 81 road games a year and needs to spend hours in the locker room every single day, as well as from those of the proprietor of derekjeteristhecutest.com. Another good idea would be to set out some expectations for online writers who want the sort of access print reporters enjoy. Ballclubs can reasonably expect online reporters to work under their own name, for instance, for a certain amount of their work to be original analysis and reporting based on their own observations and research. Setting out those sort of expectations now would make it easier for the sport to negotiate access rights with a hypothetical trade group for online writers three years from now.

However it’s handled, though, the sport does need a central policy if it’s to continue to enjoy the kind of free publicity that it always has, and which has contributed so much to its prominence (and profit margins). Consider this: Who hosts Brian Bennett’s blog? The Louisville Courier-Journal, which dates its lineage back to 1826 and was covering MLB’s Louisville Grays back in 1876. The distinction between electrons and ink is pretty thin, and it’s growing thinner every year.

tmarchman@nysun.com