Pastime, Present Time

Baseball is America’s pastime. Football is its present tense, an obvious metaphor for war. Soccer is the egalitarian future. Meanwhile, the NBA and NHL cruise through the night like tandem truckers hauling highlight reels across the interstate of our short attention spans. In the Big Five pileup, baseball is the perennial “Oh yeah, I love it, totally” sport: adored on Opening Day, forgotten by the dog days, then remembered once the leaves start falling and the games get good. Even with pace-of-play reforms shaving minutes, legalized gambling converting every at-bat into a prop bet, and robot umps inching closer to the plate, baseball still can’t compete with football’s high-stakes blood rites or soccer’s global pull.