I shouldn't care.

It shouldn't matter to me at all that the Boston Red Sox players seem to spend all of their waking moments insulting the Yankees' third baseman, Alex Rodriguez. I hate both teams, after all. But the fact that there is no hockey is causing me to read far more of the baseball coverage in the New York Times than I normally would. And it provides an interesting angle on how issues (or, in this case, non-issues) are fanned by the media, particularly in sports, where the same gang of reporters covers the same beat and interviews the same athletes every day.