Yesterday, the Daily News ran the single most loathsome piece of sportswriting I’ve read in years. I don’t mean the cover story recounting Alex Rodriguez’s personal life, which, relying on a variety of anonymous sources, insinuated that the Yankees third baseman’s taste in strippers runs toward transvestites and that he likes to take part in orgies at a poker club. That was ridiculous, but it was also highly entertaining, which counts for a lot. It wasn’t fair to Rodriguez, but it wasn’t much more unfair than what many famous people deal with all the time.

No, the worst was Bill Madden’s column. After briefly running down the fake scandal, which began with the Post running a picture of Rodriguez with a woman who is not his wife on its cover under the headline “STRAY-ROD,” Madden begins to wax profound and solemn. He’s worth quoting at some length:

“[I]n this dumbing-down, reality TV society we live in, where even the nightly cable ‘news’ programs take on the appearance of the National Enquirer, more consumed with a drunken Lindsay Lohan or Joey and Amy’s latest romantic rendezvous, ballplayers better understand their sex lives and off-the-field conduct may hold far more import with the general public than their batting or earned run averages. And with the advent of all this advanced technology, most notably cell phone cameras, all that is suddenly fair game.”

Reading this, one might think that “reality TV society,” rather than the Daily News, for which Madden works, was responsible for breaking and running news about how a baseball player goes to strip clubs and may be cheating on his wife. One might think that a sentient cell phone camera, rather than a photographer paid by the Post, took the picture of Rodriguez with a blonde that ended up on a tabloid cover. One might even think that Lindsay Lohan, rather than Madden, was the one degrading the public discourse by writing at length about the fake scandal.

None of this is too surprising. To buffoonish sportswriters (and they’re hardly alone among journalists), it’s never the regular working press that is at fault for tawdry, embarrassing coverage; it’s always the Motorola Razr or the Internet or the XBox 360. This is convenient because it allows sportswriters to pretend they’re above mere gossip while trading in it and thus satisfying the general public, whom they then insult by claiming that anyone interested in juicy gossip is a subhuman cretin, brainwashed by crummy television shows.

The tawdry, embarrassing coverage is the result of an act of agency on the part of their own papers, and the National Enquirer’s standards for sourcing are significantly higher than anything exhibited in the Daily News’s coverage of Rodriguez’s off-field antics, but this sort of thing doesn’t matter. What matters is striking and holding the pose of the sanctimonious prig.

Remarkably, Madden’s column gets far worse from there, as he damns Rodriguez at excruciating length because nosy reporters have pried into his private affairs (“It comes back to who A-Rod is and who he is not”) and even manages to work in a reference to how the sainted Derek Jeter would never allow this to happen. Best of all, though, is Madden’s implication that Rodriguez is at fault, that he not only deserves this kind of coverage, but actively courted it: “Like nature abhors a vacuum, ARod apparently can’t stand not being the center of attention with the Yankees, even if it’s in a negative way.”

I hope Bill Madden doesn’t go to strip clubs! He is, after all, a public figure. For all he knows, The New York Sun will have its crack reporters and informants near his doors, ready to splash pictures of him across the front page. He should be careful not to flaunt any wrongdoing.

While being careful, Madden, along with other outraged sports moralists, should keep a few things in mind.

First, it isn’t our supposedly degraded culture that’s responsible for scandalmongering, but specific writers and editors at the same tabloid newspapers that employ these sports moralists.

Second, there’s nothing new about scandalmongering baseball coverage. Read a 19th-century newspaper and you’ll read about all manner of riotous boozing, brawling, and whoring, often mixed in with outraged asides about the menace represented by first- and second-generation Irish ballplayers.

Third, and most important, there’s nothing inherently wrong with sleazy gossip. Everyone loves it! Aristophanes entertained audiences by making all manner of ribald accusations against respected Athenians; Proust filled his novels with recognizable figures from high society doing things even the Post would find too outrageous to cover. If scandal is good enough for the reader of À la recherche du temps perdu, it’s good enough for the tabloid reader, who need not be insulted for his perfectly understandable hunger for sleaze on the very pages of the paper he’s reading.

The Post and the Daily News should probably not, in my opinion, have run all this salacious material. There’s no news value whatever to it, it doesn’t tie in to any baseball story, and it isn’t fair to Rodriguez in that the rules were changed on him in the middle of the game. Whether squiring around strippers or showing his face at sex clubs, Rodriguez was doing so in confidence that the press would uphold the unwritten pact that has heretofore prevented anyone from writing about such activities, just as no one writes about the supposed bisexuality of one prominent Yankee or the rumors that one respected former Yankee has a backup wife.

Still, it is now a story, and it has to be written about. It’s pretty difficult to imagine Rodriguez not leaving New York after the tabloids dropped a nuclear bomb on him and then headlined stories with implications that his wife has left him, and it’s pretty difficult to imagine the Yankees not being a lot worse next year than they are now if their MVP third baseman departs for calmer waters. If it does have to be written about, let’s at least not blame the fans or the players or Grand Theft Auto for the degradation of our discourse, which is squarely down to those of us who dignify this nonsense with column inches and headlines. And let’s also not pretend it’s not entertaining. I think the world of Alex Rodriguez as a ballplayer, don’t care at all what he does in his private time, and think he’s been unfairly hounded by fiends ever since he came to New York, but when I read about a stripper accusing him of having a taste for she-males, I did the exact same thing any conscientious citizen who’s concerned with the Serious Issues of the Day would do: I laughed and laughed, and I read all the way to the end of the piece.

tmarchman@nysun.com