Baseball is back. And with it, the sports world can return to normal, but as a die-hard sports fan, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to view the games that I love the same way.

Last week my attention, along with the attention of most of the U.S. population, was centered around the attack. ESPN was right there with me, for a day at least.

They shut down operations and aired national coverage of the events courtesy of their partner station, ABC. But then after a short day or so, they decided to come back on air with sports coverage of how the attack affected the sports world.

Now this sounds like a good idea, I’ll admit, but to me it took a little bit of the appeal away from sports.

Every ESPN personality that was on air last week would say the same quote: “This tragedy has shown that sports are not as important as we make them out to be.” That’s obvious, I think pretty much everyone can agree with that. It’s what they were saying in between all of those sentences that made me mad.

They would reiterate how un-important sports are and then immediately send the camera over to Jayson Stark for an update of how baseball owners were reacting and what would become of baseball. Then on to Chris Mortensen, so we could get a feel for what different football players wanted to do this week.

Does anyone else see the irony here?

I know there was a demand last week for information on whether or not the games would be played, but the way it was handled was ridiculous. They gave their politically correct condolences and went on their merry way yapping about the games they just declared meaningless.

Sports canceled their weekend; sports media did not. They kept saying how the decision to postpone games was such a great one, but did they postpone SportsCenter? Nope.

Sports anchors were spewing out reason after reason for why no sports should be played in honor of the victims and in honor of the country, but to me, they dishonored the victims by taking the attention away from those who lost their lives and returning it to sports celebrities.

Along with this, the reasons these professional athletes were giving for why they didn’t want to play were just as bad. Player after player kept saying how they wouldn’t be able to concentrate on their job and they needed to spend time with their family.

Does the rest of America get that luxury?

I’m not saying sports should have been played this weekend, that’s a different issue – I’m just saying it killed me seeing these wealthy athletes acting like babies saying they didn’t want to go out on the field because they needed time to recover emotionally.

I know I needed time to recover emotionally too, but I went in to work the day of the attacks and started working that afternoon. My family didn’t take time off, but they didn’t whine.

Not every player reacted this way, but enough of them did that now that sports have started up again, I may not be able to follow athletes the same way I had in the past.

The professional sports world in general is receiving a ton of credit for the way they handled things after last Tuesday’s attack, but I will not be one handing out compliments.

If they wanted to show respect, they should have made the decision to cancel games right away (like Andy Geiger did here at OSU) and gone about their business.

ESPN needed to forget about ratings and suspend programming for a few days, maybe with a half-hour special every evening to update how things in the sports world were going. Repeating over and over again how un-important sports are, yet covering every sport in-depth during the tragedy – well, I think that speaks for itself.

Justin Powell is the Lantern wire editor from Worthington, Ohio. He wants to thank OSU for making the quick decision to cancel all sporting events this weekend and doing so for the right reasons. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].