A consumer’s guide to the best and...

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “Oscar: The Sportswriters Quarterly”.

Price: $3 (Call 718-658-8331).

A magazine about sportswriters, for sportswriters, written, edited and produced by sportswriters?

OK, so you could call it a niche publication.

Oscar sounds like a sportswriter, all right, whining and complaining: “For years we have been forgotten, neglected. So many journalism magazines only covered city side’s news and trends. We were simply not taken seriously.”

There are many sound and compelling reasons for this. (Hey, let’s start a magazine called Felix and discuss them all now!) Clumsily, Oscar adds fuel to the fire it is trying to douse by devoting articles in its premiere edition to cashing in frequent-guest hotel points in Amsterdam and where to find the best cheese steak in Philadelphia.

Why doesn’t Oscar just slap it up there on the masthead and cut the pretense: “Yes, We Admit It, All The Hoary Stereotypes About Sportswriters Are True And We’re Nothing But A Bunch of Low-Life Freebie-Mongering Fat Slobs.”

But Oscar isn’t fat. Or even skinny. It’s anorexic. Its 16 pages include cover, a contents-masthead page, two full-page house ads (there is no outside advertising), a full-page cartoon (all sportswriters love cartoons, don’t they?) and two full-page illustrations accompanying bylined stories.

That leaves nine pages of text--at 33 1/3 cents a page. Sportswriters all over can be glad Esquire and GQ don’t have the same price-per-page scale. Want something to read on that next flight to Cleveland? That’ll be $65, please.

The trouble with Oscar, in a free press box salted-peanut shell: One article tries to take a look at why there are so few African Americans covering major league baseball, a worthwhile endeavor. Total length of investigation: 21 paragraphs.

No sports editors are interviewed, no theories are forwarded, no answers are even suggested for such salient questions as, “Are newspapers interested in African Americans covering ‘America’s Sport’?”

But, if you want to know where to go to get the best cheese steak in Philly, Oscar is definitive there. Jim’s Steaks, on the corner of Fourth and South streets. Ask for the Cheez Whiz.