Baseball may traditionally be America’s national pastime, but as a spectator sport football is king. That’s a tribute to television broadcasting.
In a continent spanning four time zones (and I’m excluding Alaska and Hawaii), football has an enormous advantage in capturing the attention of the public. Even in an era of Monday night and occasional Thursday night games, most of the matchups are played on Sundays when most Americans are off work. That concentration of games increases the focus on them, and fans immerse themselves in the games.
For example, this weekend has been the pinnacle of the NFL season with eight teams vying to reach the two conference championships. Many of my friends and colleagues blocked out their weekend to watch the games (I dipped in and out and listened a fair amount on radio). Now that the Jets-Patriots game is over, I’m sure many of them are reliving the details on ESPN, the NFL Network and NFL.com.
The conference championships will also be closely and widely watched, followed by the Super Bowl, which will amass a huge audience of fans rabid and casual.
Baseball can’t match that, even if the network executives would get their dream matchup of the Yankees against the Dodgers or Cubs. A Mariners-Pirates World Series would be a network nightmare, but there’d be no dropoff in audience if the Seahawks faced the Steelers in the Super Bowl.
The NFL is huge, while baseball, lived day by day, inning after inning, is merely big. From spring training through a 162-game regular season plus several rounds of playoffs, baseball is seemingly always with us.
So football games seem bigger, more important by comparison.
I’m a baseball fan first and foremost, but I concede I’m in the minority in this 21st century.
Football is America’s sport.
The Ball Caps Blog 
Unfortunately, I have to completely agree with you. Interesting, then, that football is thinking of adding more regular season games to the schedule when, according to your argument (which I agree with), it is precisely the relatively small number of games the NFL plays in a season that makes each game so important.
I also think baseball could do a lot more to effectively promote the sport. Baseball is enormously popular in Latin America and in parts of Asia, so why isn’t it any longer America’s true National Pastime?
Nice post, Bill
Thanks, Bill! I agree – baseball can and should do a lot more to boost itself. It would be an interesting project to ask a lot of baseball bloggers for their suggestions. Hmm. That could be the makings of another post!
Pitchers and catchers report next month – keep the faith!