In the minds of media executives, there may be a spoken — or even unspoken — fear of killing that golden goose with the kind of tough reporting and unforgiving scrutiny that could turn off fans.

Some experts acknowledge that the sports-addicted public may not have much of an appetite for digesting serious — meaning unflattering — news about its favorite teams and players.

John Nicholson teaches television sports reporting at Syracuse University, where such famous sportscasters as Sean McDonough, Marv Albert, and Bob Costas were once enrolled. There is no investigative sports-reporting class at Syracuse. Says Nicholson, “The business of broadcasting is the business of making money. I don’t know that many people that would watch” serious sports TV journalism.

Shorr voices a similar, if debatable, thesis: “The public wants one of two things ... They want to see Barry Bonds hit home runs ... and they don’t care whether he’s taking steroids or not.”

Jeffrey Marx won a 1986 Pulitzer Prize at the Lexington Herald-Leader after a grinding investigation that uncovered cash payoffs to University of Kentucky basketball players. Despite that achievement, Marx — who was a business staffer brought in to work on the story with a Washington reporter — describes the public’s reaction to the expose as “overwhelmingly negative,” with only “pockets of positivity.” According to the paper’s projects editor, citizen reaction included a bomb threat and shots fired at the pressroom.

In Olney’s Saturday Times column, he explains that a decade ago, he once asked a prominent player if he was using steroids. When Olney received the requisite denial, he wrote, “I didn’t print a word about the exchange. I had no proof.”

As in the case of Olney, sports journalistsinsist that a large obstacle to investigative reporting is the inherent difficulty of nailing down sources and confirmation.

“There are plenty of things we ‘know,’ but we haven’t reached a standard [that allows us] to put it on the air,” says Vince Doria, the former Globe sports editor who is now director of news at ESPN.

Doria recalls the internal conversations at the Globe in the late ’80s when the lurid details of Wade Boggs’s relationship with mistress Margo Adams surfaced — some of them in the pages of Penthouse magazine.

“What were we gonna write? ‘Wade Boggs was seen in a bar with a woman’?” Doria asks. “Things happen under your nose as a reporter that don’t meet the standard.”

Glen Crevier, assistant managing editor for sports at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the president of APSE, notes that as the result of a tip, the Star Tribune broke the story last year that Minnesota Vikings running back Onterrio Smith had been caught with a “Whizzinator,” a device used for beating urine tests.

But Crevier acknowledges that a lot of stories are difficult to get into print “because you have to respect your sources. Hopefully, our standards are rising on how we use anonymous sources.”

One point on which there is widespread agreement is that it’s both inefficient and unfair to ask the beat reporters — those assigned to cover the team and the games — to risk access and relationships by suddenly turning into investigative types.

“Our beat guy ... has put up with so much crap” as a result of the BALCO story, says Fainaru-Wada. “There’s no way those guys can deal with their jobs and at the same time investigate this in any real way. It’s not the responsibility of the beat guys to get those stories.”

One of the groundbreaking works of sports journalism actually came from a Major League pitcher named Jim Bouton. With his scandalous 1970 book, Ba ll Four, Bouton peeled away the gauzy myths that permeated Major League Baseball and exposed the players as founts of human foibles — and in some case, as serious amphetamine users.

Bouton paid a price for trying to debunk the fantasies that can define the relationship between the athletes and the fans. There are a lot of reasons for the almost irrational appeal of sports: the sheer escapism; the refreshing clarity of a contest with a finite time limit that almost always ends with a winner and a loser; and, of course, the sometimes heroic exploits of people who wear the uniforms we cheer for.

For his role in pulling back that curtain, Bouton was ostracized from the baseball fraternity and not invited to a New York Yankees old-timer game until 1998.