I happened on a web entry recently that suggests the long history of sports reporters “sticking to sports” is over.

We have entered an era, the author wrote, when your favorite sports correspondent should feel free to work into his or her Twitter feed his or her opinion on the political side of current events. Any old time.

Which comes with the suggestion that openly political sports journalists is a good development … that the people in the business had been self-censoring for far too long and now can be free, free, free!

Wow. What a horrible idea.

Any sports journalists who works for something larger than his or her personal blog are likely to find that allowing politics into the room is divisive and probably destructive to the bottom line.

Sticking to sports should be the game plan of everyone in the sports journalism business — and probably already is the organizational policy of executives who employ sports journalists.

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Ichiro Suzuki is playing his 17th season of Major League Baseball, but I still don’t know quite what to make of him.

He picked up his 3,054th hit today, making him the all-time leader among MLB players born outside the United States, one ahead of the Panama-born Rod Carew.

That puts him 24th among all MLB players, in a career that did not commence on this side of the Pacific until he was 27 years old. That is no small feat.

But how valuable has he been, really?

Is he one of the greatest players in the history of the game?

Or is he more like the greatest singles hitter in the history of the game?

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Chicks may dig the long ball, as the slogan went from 20 years ago. But I do not. And when a pitcher hits a 467-foot home run, as Jon Gray did in Denver today, it’s time to act against the home run madness that is disfiguring Major League Baseball in 2017.

Gray’s homer was the longest recorded by a pitcher since baseball began keeping records, for hurlers hitting, in 2015, and also was the longest hit by any member of the Rockies this season, whether the club was playing in mile-high or sea-level conditions.

Which further convinces me …

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Thank goodness this is July 4, because after tonight’s games Major League Baseball players can stop wearing the garish and ridiculous special uniforms they have been trapped in since July 1.

What is it the kids say of something that is lame and stupid?

“Clown shoes”, I think it is.

Just about everything the world’s greatest ballplayers have been modeling since Saturday fits the “clown shoes” definition — aside from their actual cleats, which seem more or less normal.

The worst? Those socks. Red-and-white rings on one leg, blue stars on a white background on the other. It makes me think of Bozo. Or Fizbo.

What ought to be done with these?

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I was going to do this as a list.

“The five dreariest assignments in sports journalism.”

Down from the normal 10, when I do lists. (And I ought to do some sort of list soon, just cuz.)

Then I realized I would have trouble coming up with even five events that felt like drudgery, while covering them, over the span of a 40-year career.

Five events that had the ability to put me to sleep. While on the clock … which seemed to have stopped an hour ago.

Here are a couple.

–Open-wheel racing on street circuits. That means no passing. Or nearly no passing. Just guys driving around, waiting to see if they break before they finish. Thinking Long Beach Grand Prix here … or just about any Formula One circuit.

–Golf. Yes. It seems slow when you play. It seems nearly motionless when you watch someone else play. When I covered The Masters for a week in 1980, and thought the moment of someone putting on a green jacket would never come … I remember thinking, “Someone who cares about this ought to be here, instead of me.”

But even those two are behind this one. The dreariest “live” event to cover in sports journalism.

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I remember the 2009 Confederations Cup, in South Africa, where the U.S. national team nearly won a global competition.

Bob Bradley’s Yanks shocked world-No. 1, unbeaten-in-35-matches Spain 2-0 in the semifinals (go back and read that again), then faced Brazil in the championship match and led 2-0 at half … before losing 3-2.

I noted, not long ago, how that tournament was the high-water mark in the U.S. national team’s history. They fell 45 minutes short of winning a Fifa cup competition.

But I would have conceded that, in 2009, the Confederations Cup didn’t quite feel like a really major thing. An interesting little tournament, something to help fill the summer ahead of the World Cup but not a life-changing competition.

Eight years later?

I am convinced the Confederations Cup has become a big deal. A trophy countries now care about winning.

Or it sure looked that way tonight, when Germany defeated Chile 1-0 in the championship match — and the Germans celebrated like they had won the World Cup … and the Chileans wept and wailed as if they had lost the same.

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Manny Pacquiao lost his slice of the world welterweight championship tonight when he lost a unanimous but controversial decision to little-known Australian Jeff Horn in Brisbane.

The fight happened on Sunday morning, in Australia, so that it could be shown on live non-pay-per-view TV in the U.S., where it was Saturday night.

(Here is video of the whole of the fight.)

Most observers who adjudge themselves experts thought the Filipino won an often awkward fight, one that seemed to produce a clash of heads at least once in every round.

Pacquaio left the door open to the judges going against him by failing to knock out — or knock down — the former schoolteacher from Queensland, and the judges certainly would have felt the yearning of the crowd, made up primarily of Horn fans.

This is the sort of thing that happens late in the careers of little guys who have climbed a weight category — or seven, as Pacquiao has — during their careers.

They still can land punches, but they have trouble knocking out men who are bigger than they are.

The good news, for Paquiao’s millions of fans?

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Of all the melancholy aspects of newspapers shrinking, or failing, or shutting down, it is the abandonment of a newsroom that makes me most wistful.

Today is the final day in the original home of The National, the first English-language newspaper in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

We spent six years there and left barely a year and a half ago.

Since then, oil prices have remained depressed, which limits the cash flowing to the government, which owns Abu Dhabi Media, publisher of The National. At least, until tomorrow, when the newspaper becomes property of the International Media Investments, beginning with editions of July 2 …

Operations will cease in the sprawling newsroom on the ground floor of the ADM building, and The National moves to more intimate digs in the twofour54 free zone on the southern tip of Abu Dhabi Island.

So, that is “– 30 –” for The National on the edge of downtown after a bit more than nine years since the newspaper began publication, in May of 2008.

I am grateful that Hussain, a former colleague, has posted to Instagram a photo gallery of the old newsroom on its last day.

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This seems quaint.

Print journalists are making a case to management that a planned layoff of dozens of veteran copy editors … is a very bad idea.

It seems like such an Aughties thing, this push back. From 2007, 2008, 2009 — the opening years of the Great Newsroom Layoffs.

Of late, in an industry featuring lots of empty desks and beaten-down morale, the dissed and dismissed in newsrooms across the U.S. have, mostly, gone quietly.

(Part of that was newspaper management perfecting techniques for heading off dissent by tying severance packages to an orderly, complaint-free exit — see espn.com)

Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is journalists at the New York Times, historically one of the best-edited newspapers in the world, who are raising a ruckus.

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We like to think weather can never be severe, here in the Languedoc, in the south of France.

That mindset took a hit tonight.

A strong storm blew through the area, and five mature plane trees were snapped like matchsticks by powerful winds in the nearest “big” town to us.

Some local anglophones were talking about a “tornado”.

Hey, it can’t happen here!

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