By Joe Frey

On the eve of the National Football League’s greatest orgy (the Super Bowl, XLII this year. Or 42 for those of you who missed that day in the third grade when we learned the uselessness—if not the pretentious ridiculousness—of Roman numerals); on the cusp of yet another Major League Baseball season (to be played in the shadow of the steroids scandal); with the Bears’ dramatic Super-Bowl-to-super-cellar season already a distant memory; with the Cubs just a season away from a full century of championshiplessness; with the White Sox depleting the goodwill fans granted the team in the wake of its World Series victory two long seasons ago; and in this presidential election year, what more appropriate occasion could there possibly be to assess the national dichotomy most memorably expressed by George Carlin’s monologue “Baseball and Football?” Though still accurate, Carlin’s almost wistful observations about the differences between the two sports merely allude to the cultural ramifications of these differences. Left explicitly unanswered is how “[i]n football you receive a penalty. In baseball you make an error” and other whimsical observations that reflect on the culture at large.

Full disclosure: I find baseball, as a sport, to be far superior to football. Not that it matters; this has nothing to do with the question posed. And the undeniable truth of the matter is that football far better reflects the national cultural climate than does baseball. It has for years. This has nothing to do with baseball’s relatively recent troubles, like the 1994 players strike, which four years later required Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa’s steroid-fueled home run race to break Roger Maris’s season record to repair the PR damage, which itself has spawned its own scandal and PR fiasco during Barry Bond’s recent breaking of Hank Aaron’s career home run record. If anything, in fact, celebrity scandal such as these do nothing but put baseball more in alignment with the national ethos. Yet it’s still not near enough; baseball just can no longer be referred to as the National Pastime—except sarcastically or nostalgically. (Filmmaker Ken Burns, in his PBS film Baseball, released coincidentally enough the same year as the strike, tried to make an argument for the sport’s contemporary relevance; instead he revealed the obsolescence implicit in the nostalgia for it.)

But if baseball’s ever more astigmatic lens of the culture has nothing to do with its recent shortcomings, what did cause this dramatic shift in prominence? It’s an easy target, and everybody’s favorite whipping boy, but this time the bad rap is deserved; the catalyst was television. It doesn't take Curt Gowdy, John Madden, Billy Packer or Marshall McLuhan to see that television isn't kind to baseball. Basketball is a game small enough to be encompassed by it; football is a brutal Roman contest facile enough to be complicated by it; but nothing can prevent baseball from being doomed by television. Why? Half horse race, half card game, half track meet, half picnic, if you can't be there in person, baseball has always been best enjoyed through telling, in print or on the radio. In the same way that a reader imposes his imagination on a book’s story, a baseball fan listening to a radio broadcast can create an entire game in his mind; the simplicity and repetitive quality of the action not only lends itself to such wool gathering but encourages it. This investment in imagination creates intimacy, which is at the very core of baseball's romantic, nostalgic appeal.

Television, however, is voyeuristic not romantic, and it courts football like a frat boy with a vial full of GHB. As it is with everything from talk shows to news programs to so-called reality shows, television infiltrates the very life blood of whatever it trains its lens on, eclipsing human experience, turning football into a fantastical spectacle rather than a sporting competition, just as it turns human frailties and foibles into freak sideshows. And just as with Jerry Springer, television is not only a witness to football, but an active participant in it, and an important one at that.

It's still hard to fathom that the governors of professional football thought it was a good idea to compromise the autonomy of the on-field officials by placing spies the sky to oversee them. But they did. The video judgments are still human though, even filtered through the lying lens of television and captured in slo-mo from a dozen different angles. The perception in every den and rumpus room across the country, however, is that true justice has been impartially, unerringly and omnisciently served by an unseen authority. (Sound familiar?)

No, it’s not that baseball changed; it didn't. The world around it changed. It's become an Amish cult in a televangelist world. Baseball demands almost monastic devotion. The season is long, a half year. A good pennant race takes time and patience to watch and even more to enjoy and understand. Games are played—get this—every day. Lose this afternoon and you have to forget about it to play tomorrow. But the season, once poetically framed between spring and autumn, has become cramped by the ever-encroaching NFL season, not to mention NASCAR’s dizzying drone.

Yet in football—like church—the games are played one a week, and each takes on the artificial monumentality of life itself, like some panelist pouring out his heart about the psychosis-of-the-month in front of Oprah or Dr. Phil and the rest of world watching at home. A religion to many, football demands that its devout followers seek quasi-sanctified fulfillment in other places, like merciless and repetitive television replays of mortal assaults, injuries and other gratuitous pleasures, accompanied by navel-contemplative analysis and motivational sermons during the mid-week slow periods that make up most of the season. Is it any wonder that fans, mimicking broadcasters, discuss football the same way they discuss politics, which more and more has become indistinguishable from religion?

In comparison, the seemingly interminable string of baseball games each summer, like the mostly dull and never-ending progression of inconveniences and simple pleasures that make up most of human existence, just can't hold a candle to football.

If baseball ever was an America in microcosm, as it was once popularly depicted by the likes of Ring Lardner, it isn't anymore. (Random question: name one good book about football? Okay, besides North Dallas Forty, and one that is at least slightly laudatory.) Undeniably, that dubious honor now belongs to football. And like television, it is an American vulgarity.

Football is a sensationalistic exhibition that has little shame, so little that rules—with penalties for violation—must be enforced to keep the participants from making too much of their displays of celebration, celebrations that are the very thing that the spectators wish to see, for that's what makes football a perfect television event and cultural mirror in Britneyland: its exhibitionist core. It was tailor made for television as much Paris, Lindsay, Sen. Craig, televangelists and the self-help guru du jour ever were.

A revealing anecdote: A couple seasons ago, I took a rabid football fan to a baseball game and he was engaged only when a brush back pitch resulted in a bench-clearing brawl. While this does happen from time to time, it’s not what baseball is about. Yet that's what this all comes down to: the sport’s object of aggression. In baseball, it’s the ball; in football, it’s every person on the other team. While the single most difficult act in all of sportsdom is hitting a baseball, surely the easiest has to be to run into another human being. And despite the fact that there’s nothing in sports more graceful than a well-executed 6-4-3 double play, it just can't compare on television to a reverse-angle, super slow-mo eye-in-the-sky replay of a blind-side, decapitating quarterback sack.

Now, that's television. That’s football. And that’s us.

To paraphrase an architecture piece I wrote over four years ago about the refurbished Soldier Field:

What else is there to say but that Chicago’s new football stadium is the ultimate setting for the sanitized violence that comprises the corporate gladiatorial contests that are professional football? Nothing, except that no other sports arena—indeed, no other building of any type—better expresses the zeitgeist: a public trust gutted, into which is inserted a violent engine for private profit.

No wonder it scares the hell out of me.