I hate the Pittsburgh Pirates. The squad represents everything that is wrong with professional sports in America. The Pirates haven't posted a .500 record in 17 seasons yet they receive sympathy from the clowns who still believe baseball has an uneven playing field. Revenue sharing has successfully lined the pockets of small loser market owners who refuse to spend the money they get from baseball, and the teams that try to win. Nate McLouth is the perfect example, he's 27 years old and makes roughly $4.5 million a season, yet he was just traded by the Pirates to Atlanta in an effort to "rebuild" yet again. The Pirates are always rebuilding which allows them the excuse to pocket the $20-50 million they get each year from baseball. Why you ask, are we discussing this topic on an MMA blog? WEC is here in Sacramento and has to beg for coverage from the local paper, the Sacramento Bee. It's the fourth high-level UFC/WEC event that has come to town and the paper barely gives it a sniff. Who owns the paper? Kevin McClatchy. The same guy who ran the Pirates into the ground (1996-2009) is running a failed newpaper business.

This is not meant to smash most of the poor people working in the newspaper business. Their publishers and editors haven't changed with the times. Which includes becoming more internet based and finding ways to get folks under 60 to read the paper. When it comes to sports is there a better way to grab the 12-to-34-year old audience than MMA? Yet on the Saturday before WEC 41 at Arco Arena with a local boy, Urijah Faber headlining the card, the Sacramento Bee didn't even do a story on the event. It gives us a notebook-style piece explaining what WEC and MMA are, and a few qutoes from the fighters. The story is on 6C of the sports section. Keep in mind, Sunday's card will draw upwards of 12,000. Stories deemed front-page worthy over the WEC with a local star in the event: WNBA (three stories), girls' high school pole vaulting and the Pac-10 rowing championship.

You can defend WNBA, Sactown does have a team and today is the season opener but high school pole vaulting and rowing? There's a wave of 50-plus sports editors across the country that need to be swept out of office, but by the time newspapers get younger it may be too late to save the industry.

Before you say MMA isn't mainstream and doesn't help the bottomline - ad sales. I work at a mainstream radio station, doing a mainstream radio show. ESPNRadio1100 and Lotus Broadcasting in Las Vegas finds a way to mesh programming and the bottomline in covering MMA. The Las Vegas Review-Journal just assigned Adam Hill to be the first full-time MMA witer in the country and the Las Vegas Sun posts 10-12 stories a week on MMA. I'm not saying MMA is going to save a paper or a sports section but the lack of coverage represents something bigger - newspapers are still operating with a 1975 mindset. Enjoy all the Belmont Stakes coverage this weekend!