Reality TV shows based on news-making families cannot be all goodness and light.

Some weird stuff going on? Some family tension? That helps feed interest in shows like Keeping up with the Kardashians, which has been runnnig since 2007. And, also, about the Balls and their much more recent reality debut.

LiAngelo Ball’s run-in with police in China? (Which ended Tuesday when he and two UCLA teammates got on a plane headed for Los Angeles.) That may not be good for the 2017-18 stats of LiAngelo, the middle of LaVar Bell’s three sons, but it could be reality-TV gold for LaVar & Co.

If Lonzo, a rookie with the Los Angeles Lakers, is (maybe) the star in the making, and little brother LaMelo is the brash gunner and “cute one” who could have a significant career …

LiAngelo can be cast as the edgy rebel.

His and his teammates’ sticky fingers created an international incident in China that deeply embarrassed UCLA, the Pac-12 and the U.S. government (and just about everyone who isn’t LaVar)– and that sets LiAngelo and his weirdly cropped eyebrows on the way to “bad boy” billing.

(And everyone loves a bad boy. A staple of theater/drama since the Greeks.)

LaVar Ball, pater familias of the Ball reality show (seen on Facebook) and founder of the Big Baller Brand line of shoes and apparel, certainly must see the creative possibilities here.

Consider:

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Italy went bonkers tonight. The national team, the azzurri, was held to a scoreless draw with good-but-not-special Sweden, and the home-and-away runners-up playoffs for the final four European berths at Russia 2010 went to Switzerland, Denmark, Croatia — and Sweden.

Italy stays home.

This is the biggest shock from this edition of World Cup qualifying — Italy being the four-time world champions.

Our interest today is looking at Italy failing to qualify for Russia 2018, and comparing it, for earthshaking significance, to the U.S. not making it.

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Funny thing, NFL schedules. Fans and journalists yammer, before the season, about how easy or tough this or that team’s schedule is. And then they play the games …

Which this year has led to an unexpected, semi-elite showdown of division-leading 7-2 teams, the Los Angeles Rams and Minnesota Vikings teams. Teams who, two months ago, were expected to be also-rans. At best.

What’s more, remember the two quarterbacks who suffered through the 4-12 Rams season in 2016? They will meet on the field in Minneapolis on Sunday. Jared Goff of the Rams and Case Keenum, late of the Rams, now the starting quarterback for the Vikings.

One of the leading takeaways of that?

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While packing to move to France, I came across an ancient and tiny baseball glove.

An American going abroad … can he really leave behind a baseball glove? (Even one that is not his own?)

No. He cannot. There’s going away, and then there is leaving behind an essential part of your cultural patrimony.

But what use is one baseball glove without another? Two gloves needed to play catch, the most basic of all baseball activities.

So, we went to an “everything must go!” closeout sale of a sporting goods retailer, while in SoCal, and bought a second glove … and then we packed the “official” California League baseball, too — and baseball goes to the Old World.

Not that we took the baseball gear directly from the shipping container and away to the nearest playground. Actually, it was a year. But now we have “had a catch” as the old usage goes, perhaps to the puzzlement of the local kids kicking around a soccer ball or the parents with their daughter on “for-little-kids-only” monkey bars with slide.

And I decided something:

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If you think about it, not much pertaining to the 2018 Russia World Cup has been of a global nature, so far.

In qualifying competition, European nations played nations from the European confederation. Asian nations played other Asian nations. And so on.

The 2018 World Cup has been a regional event, to date.

That changed tonight.

Two home-and-away inter-confederation playoffs began, involving four teams and two World Cup berths which put the “globe” in “global”.

I love the inter-confederation playoffs. They are so random, so high-pressure and so-close-and-yet-so-far — both in proximity to Russia 2018 as well as physical distance from the opponent.

Australia versus Honduras. New Zealand versus Peru. Each of the winners goes to Russia.

How fun.

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The wind blows sometimes, here in the south of France.

In the summer, that can pose problems with slamming doors, because we like to keep the windows open throughout the season, when it can be a bit warm. And gusty.

Thus, we prop open the doors with compact and heavy things lying about.

An old iron. Water bottles. A potted plant.

The Baseball Encyclopedia.

Yes, The Baseball Encyclopedia. The massive reference book (all seven pounds of it) of America’s pastime. The book on my desk, of which I said, years ago: “If a fire sweeps this building and I can save only two things, it will be The Baseball Encyclopedia … and something else.”

The tome that led Stan Musial to say: “Everything you’ve always wanted to know about baseball but couldn’t find in one place before. … The amount of information is staggering.”

The book that led Reggie Jackson to say: “If you can’t find it here you won’t be able to find it anywhere. This is the finest baseball record book in existence.”

A book not long ago considered essential to the library of every newspaper sports section in America. A book that covered 2,875 pages in the seventh edition, printed in 1988, and cost $45 — which was real money, 30 years ago.

Now sitting on a bedroom floor at our home, collecting dust.

And as I walked past it the other day, it struck me that the near total eclipse of The Baseball Encyclopedia by online resources like baseballreference.com … was not unlike the trampling of print journalism by the internet. And almost as painful.

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From the eastern side of the Atlantic, LiAngelo seemed like the “other” Ball.

We had big brother Lonzo Ball, one-year standout at UCLA, now with the Los Angeles Lakers.

We had LaMelo, the little brother, the quick one who makes tons of threes, who would be a junior in high school if not for his family falling out with the Chino Hills prep coach — and LaMelo withdrawing from school.

And, of course, we had proud papa LaVar, marketing wizard/blowhard for the family and the Big Baller Brand.

Then there was LiAngelo. Middle son. Whose first name was not spelled, in the media, with any consistency until quite recently.

Well, now we all know who LiAngelo is — the Ball who was detained by police in China yesterday, along with UCLA teammates Cody Riley and Jalen Hill, on suspicion of shoplifting sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store, according to the Washington Post.

Probably not the preferred manner for getting your name in headlines, but we all can spell “LiAngelo” now.

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In American sports, I will not abide the criticism of two (and only two) men — Vin Scully and, especially, John Wooden. (Here is my obit on him, from 2010.)

Wooden coached UCLA’s basketball program to 10 NCAA championships, in the 1960s and 1970s, and he did it with consummate class and sportsmanship, nearly forgotten qualities.

And he wasn’t just a  guy with a whistle; Wooden created an entire philosophy of competing called the Pyramid of Success, which embraced such homely virtues as poise, friendship and loyalty.

Now, Wooden has come under attack, seven years after he died, at age 99, by former Indiana coach Bobby Knight, a renown churl and verbal-abuse machine, who shared exactly one aspect of his life with Wooden — both were successful college basketball coaches.

Though Knight achieved far less than did Wooden, winning three national titles at Indiana.

That has not stopped Knight from attacking Wooden, which seems to suggest Knight is not paying attention to the Pyramid of Success. Especially when it comes to one of Wooden’s pyramid blocks:

Self control.

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“Not getting” as in “not partaking” but also as in “failing to understand” what podcasts really do for news organizations.

Podcasts, you may have noticed, are a hot thing. Seems like just about everyone has one now, which could be an example of “other sites are doing it; we better, too”. The herd mentality being a powerful thing.

But it also seems to reflect a notion that podcasts are a new revenue stream for struggling (as just about all of them are) news sites.

Not getting it.

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OK, everyone who predicted the 2017 Los Angeles Rams would win six of their first eight games, with Jared Goff in the upper third of the league in passing yards (2,030, ninth) and quarterback rating (97.9, ninth) … please stand up.

All of you standing … thanks to owning up to your outrageous lies. We can recommend a mental-health professional for you.

The Rams are, in fact, 6-2 after nuking the New York Giants 51-17 today.

This is getting unreal.

A team with much the same cast of players as it had in 2016 — when the club went 4-12 (its 10th consecutive losing season) — now leads the NFL in points-differential (+108) and points scored per game (32.9).

How is this possible?

Here is how, in three paragraphs:

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