At least once a year, we in the media (consisting primarily of myself, three editorial assistants and Dan Rather) flip out over something or other, then round it out afterwards with a rousing chorus of "Gee, What Were We Thinking?" and a promise not to lose our mud to quite the same degree the next time a story breaks — which of course, we will.

We just had one of those panics out here in the greater New York metropolitan area, but no apology yet as of press time. So I’ll start.

We were complete idiots about John Rocker.

Not that Rocker wasn’t also a complete idiot, but that’s his business. The press is supposed to remain calm, even when our subject doesn’t. And frankly, a few of my brethren in the press went over to the dark side on this one.

First, shortly after Sports Illustrated reported our hero’s jazzy remarks about the No. 7 subway, headline writers and the baseball establishment began implying that Rocker is craAAAazy, a libelous assertion ably supported by the man’s unfortunate name and his breathtaking collection of odd tics.

But he’s not a lunatic. He’s a goon. There’s a difference. The remarks he made in Sports Illustrated were the kind of things I’ve heard a lot of guys say behind closed doors – high school kids, guys I used to work with at the docks, people I’ve met on the No. 7. Believe me, he’s performing to a crowd. Study, if you will, the rhythm in his remarks: "…next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time…" This is the confident patter of someone accustomed to getting laughs with this material.

He was just doing the dozens on us. He was just talkin’ trash about our mommas. The baseball establishment eventually punished Rocker for his remarks, but as we all know, the First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly says you’re not supposed to penalize someone for talkin’ trash about your momma.

The real idiocies, though, began when Rocker came to town last week. As Rocker himself once put it about Mets fans, "Just by saying something, I could make them mad enough to go home and slap their moms." That’s just what some TV reporters did. You could see them trying to pony up a lynch mob with man-on-the-street interviews about Rocker — though for their troubles, they’d only find one psychotic guy with a misplaced personal grudge against this cardboard villain, and a half a dozen others who said Rocker’s remarks are an irrelevancy to the series overall.

The reporters’ conclusion? People no longer worry about Sadaam Hussein because John Rocker takes up all the room in our head. He stands astride the world like a colossus, mighty as a Greek god. Fear and appease John Rocker, before he starts talking about foreigners again.

One reporter even got on the No. 7 to look for anyone with purple hair or who’d been in jail four times — concluding after this frantic, random, half-day sampling that John Rocker was just WRONG!!! It reminds me of a scene in "I’m From Hollywood," a documentary about Andy Kaufman’s wrestling career, when Kaufman bates the people of the south by telling them to try an amazing new substance called "soap." In the next scene, a southerner solemnly informs us, "He got it all wrong. We use soap down here."

You can’t improve on that as a punch line.

Finally, the day after the series opener, I could hear the palpable disappointment in the reporters’ voices when they had to admit it had just been another stinky little baseball game. Hey, who cares about that?

The fact is, the media went crazy. The media is immature. The media is sick and sad. Pity the poor media. Maybe the media should be sent down to the minors.