The decline of interest in baseball is a harbinger of waning American power

Long considered the country’s “national pastime”, baseball reflects the very best qualities of the American spirit, the higher values upon which our society was (theoretically, at least) founded: freedom, independence, tolerance. Football is a violent, territorial sport that rewards brute strength over everything else and symbolises, at its base level, imperialism, bloodlust, and corporate capitalism’s tendency to flatten any and all eccentricity into bland, cog-in-the-machine homogeny.

Sadly, it’s more than clear at this point that Americans don’t much like baseball anymore, at least compared to how much we like football.

This is a deep – and worsening – flaw in our collective character, as telling a sign of American decline as our terrible math skills, our tragic and preventable high infant mortality rate or the depreciation of our GDP vis-a-vis China.

Through its first five games, this year’s World Series has been an excellent one by almost all accounts: it marks the Kansas City Royals’ first trip to the postseason in 29 years and pits them against a burgeoning dynasty in the San Francisco Giants, who have won two championships in four years. It’s been beautifully played, closely contested and very exciting. Nonetheless, 7.2 million more people watched a regular season football game between the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers, according to Variety, than watched Madison Bumgarner pitch the Giants to victory in Sunday night’s game five.

Baseball is the most individualist of our major team sports: 9 solitary players, spread across a two-and-a-half-acre field, each charged with doing his own job by himself. Especially in its central competition – pitcher vs. hitter, facing off at just over 60 feet [18m], it mirrors the drama and heroism of a gunslinger’s duel at high noon. The outcome of every pitch of every game – a hundred one-on-one micro-battles of wit, timing and accuracy – is determined as much by savvy and feint of hand as it is by speed and strength. Think of the submarine relief pitcher, scraping his knuckles on the mound as he throws a deceptive sinker. Or the knuckleballer, floating butterfly pitches at a tantalising 6omph. Or the backhanded, inside-out swing of a placement hitter, slicing a soft line drive just out of an infielder’s reach. Baseball is a complicated, quirky endeavour that rewards kooks who do things their own way.

My least favourite thing about football (well, at least until recently, when medical research has proven that its gladiatorial and criminalising are beyond my moral comfort zone) has always been that the players wear helmets that cover their faces. One of the great joys of sports spectatorship comes in facial expressions – a pitcher’s scowl melting into a grimace after giving up a home run, the batter’s face lighting up with joy and pride. It offers a fascinating window into human psychology, and allows for easier emotional connection with the otherwise meaningless games that we project our workaday hopes and fears and anger and miseries onto. (Sports are essentially escapist, right? Why else would we watch?)

Faceless in their masks, indistinguishable beneath their armour, often piled ajumble in a scrum, football players don’t let us see what they’re feeling on the field. They’re stonier, scarier – more Stormtrooper than human.

This facelessness of football falls in line with its overall ethos. Far more team-oriented in its play, the sport is based on the subjugation of the self to a collective effort. A group of men pushing in a single direction, directing all their will and power towards a shared goal: moving a ball over a line. The all-for-one-and-one-for-all aspect of the game buffers the militaristic metaphors so often employed to describe it. The quarterback is a “field general”, the linemen are “soldiers in the trenches”. How many wars has America fought over the past 50 years? How many of them still rage on in one form or another? How many quagmires do we find ourselves stuck in? Pax Americana? “Peace through superior fire power?” How much harm have these lies done in the world? How much harm have they done to us? Might makes right in this ugly worldview, as it does in football.

Watch a group of defenders tackle a running back at the line of scrimmage. The swarming, the pile-on – do we have a better metaphor for the “tyranny of majority”, the great danger De Tocqueville warned us of way back in 1835? Individual expression, steamrolled by a horde.

An America that worships football and ignores baseball is one choosing its worse angels over its better ones. It is – we are – a dumb, floundering nation.