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Three quarters of a century ago, the preeminent cultural historian Jacques Barzun wrote, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

Baseball favors a measured, pastoral rhythm, Barzun wrote. Baseball has a democratic cast, requiring every player to come to bat, even pitchers who usually are not very good at it. Much is left to chance in baseball, and this keeps Americans who like taking chances on the edges of their seats. There is no game clock in baseball. Baseball leaves fans and spectators time for conversation. Baseball’s rules provide checks and balances. Placing the mound out 90 feet evens the odds between batter and pitcher. A bit like the United States Constitution balances governance, Barzun thought. So the game fit the country. That was then.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1954, and baseball, once key to understanding the currents of our character and our psychology, has slipped to a distant third in popularity. Basketball has climbed past baseball to the number two slot, with about one and a half million watching a game on television. But a single regular season football game now attracts 20 or 25 million American viewers, and that adds up to about 150 million football fans in the United States. It’s no contest.

Baseball, played in a park, tuned to slow, summer, rural rhythms when a third of Americans still lived on farms. Football fits a corporate, urbanized, keyed-up America. Football plays out in bursts of rigidly timed intervals. Football is minutely planned and efficiently managed. Artificial intelligence now sits alongside assistant coaches, helping them crunch data in the booth high above........

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