Wherein the blogger comes back from his end-of-semester crunch ... First off, I didn't realize Ken Griffey Jr. was still playing.

Second, it's amusing how the story of his alleged clubhouse nap has taken off. One of the lead headlines on ESPN today is how Mariners players are refusing to talk to the reporter who wrote the story for the Tacoma paper.

For one thing, this won't last. Tonight, if someone on the Mariners throws a perfect game, or hits a game-winning single in the ninth, they'll talk to everyone. It'd be awesome to see the other reporters band together and not go into the clubhouse tonight in a show of support, but that'd be cutting off the noses to spite their faces.

What's interesting is the fact that this is a story at all. Folks, I can tell you with certainty that this kind of thing happens all ... the ... time. Players or managers get mad at something you wrote, they won't talk to you. They always make a show of how they're not talking to you. It happened to me more than once - and I was not an adversarial kind of beat writer. If you are doing your job, eventually you're going to write something that pisses people off. They get mad, and they get over it. In no way is it a front-page story.

This, to me, speaks to how self-reflexive the media is at times. It's something I'd like to research at some point in my academic career. How the story isn't necessarily about the event, but about the media coverage of the event. Think Brett Favre's annual comeback, the Tiger Woods story, most anything Jason Whitlock or Dan LeBatard writes (though I am a big fan of Whitlock's columns.) There's as much - if not more - coverage about the coverage rather than the actual story itself.

We're probably not that far away from third-generation reflexivity: Coverage about the media's coverage of the media's coverage of an event.