Maybe they were disappointed with the decision; maybe they were just asleep at the copy desk. But the news media last week virtually ignored a significant news development about baseball and steroids, a highly popular topic in recent years.

The news media ignored the story so thoroughly that it took a news release from the Major League Baseball Players Association, a.k.a., the players’ union, four days later to wake up editors and induce at least some of them to put the story in the pages of their Wednesday editions.

It took yet two more days for the story to appear in the pages of one of the two newspapers that have most aggressively covered baseball and steroids in recent years.

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Let me get this straight. The Philadelphia Phillies have just done what they could have done a year ago but opted not to do. Did it take them that year to realize they made a mistake when they traded Cliff Lee to Seattle last Dec. 16? Plenty of people told them that. I even wrote it a time or two or six.

Ruben Amaro Jr., the Phillies’ general manager, addressed the controversial issue Dec. 15 at the news conference at Citizens Bank Park where the Phillies re-introduced Lee to the city and the team’s fans. They had already introduced him last July when they acquired him in a trade with Cleveland.

There should have been no need to re-introduce Lee this week. The Phillies should have kept him even as they traded for Roy Halladay.

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My last column was all about Marvin Miller, who was not elected to the Hall of Fame, with nary a word nor a mention about Pat Gillick, who was. That was by design because Gillick deserves more than a mention. And if he didn’t deserve it because of a great career as a general manager (a career as a great general manager?), he earned it with his comments after learning that he had been elected to the Hall of Fame.

Responding to reporters’ questions about his practices as a general manager, Gillick rejected the statistical analysis approach to player evaluation that has become the popular thing to do among younger general managers.

“I think you have to watch the game,” the 73-year-old Gillick said. “The statistics tell you one thing and they don’t want anything happening emotionally on the field or anything on the field to really tinker with those statistics sometimes.”

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