Foot­ball com­bines the two worst things about Amer­i­ca: it is vio­lence punc­tu­at­ed by com­mit­tee meet­ings.  – George Will

The NFL has decid­ed that today’s fea­tured game – played at night dur­ing prime­time, rather than dur­ing the after­noon – will be the Philadel­phia Eagles against the Chica­go Bears. That deci­sion shows just how con­fi­dent the league is that you will watch just about any game they decide to air, a well-ground­ed con­fi­dence built on decades of sol­id leadership.

They could have put the Bal­ti­more-New Eng­land game in the slot.  It pits the reign­ing Super Bowl Cham­pi­on Ravens against Tom Brady and the Patri­ots.  It seems a bet­ter rat­ings-get­ter. Tom Brady is an elite quar­ter­back who has won 3 Super Bowls, done GQ cov­ers and has a super­mod­el wife. Your sis­ter knows who Tom Brady is.  Ask her if she’s heard of Nick Foles.  Or Jay Cutler.

Foles and Cut­ler are the lead­ers of the two high­ly flawed teams you’ll be watch­ing tonight.  The Eagles and Bears have won bare­ly more games than they’ve lost and nei­ther is a sure bet to make the play­offs.  That each team leads its respec­tive divi­sion with an 8–6 record is less a tes­ta­ment to their strength than to the weak­ness of their rivals.

The game does have what com­men­ta­tors call “play­off impli­ca­tions.”  But so does the Patri­ots-Ravens match.  Of the 16 games to be played today and tomor­row, 12 fall into that cat­e­go­ry.  Under the NFL’s play­off sys­tem, the best teams are com­pet­ing for home field advan­tage, above-aver­age teams are vying to win their divi­sions, and mediocre teams are hop­ing for some improb­a­ble chain of events that will secure them a berth in the post-sea­son tour­na­ment.  Even the games of mis­er­able teams count for some­thing, as the worst seek high­er draft picks (unless, like the Red­skins, you’ve already trad­ed away your first-round pick).   Near­ly every game is relevant.

The NFL knows that casu­al fans with no root­ing inter­est will tune in tonight to watch two teams that lack impres­sive resumes and mar­quis quar­ter­backs.  That’s because the game’s over­lords have devel­oped a prod­uct that peo­ple will con­sume, almost entire­ly with­out respect to the teams involved.

The NFL’s suc­cess con­trasts sharply with Major League Baseball’s fail­ures.  Once the nation’s pas­time, even baseball’s pre­mier event now strug­gles to attract view­ers. It was big news in Octo­ber when the fourth game of the World Series edged out the Sun­day night tele­cast of a mid-sea­son Pack­ers-Vikings game.

The World Series, America’s top sport­ing event just a gen­er­a­tion ago, does­n’t belong in the same con­ver­sa­tion with the Super Bowl.  More than 108 mil­lion peo­ple watched this year’s NFL cham­pi­onship game.   The World Series typ­i­cal­ly aver­ages 15–20 mil­lion view­ers.    The two sports are mov­ing in oppo­site direc­tions.   Super Bowl view­er­ship is up 30 per­cent over the past 25 years despite the pro­lif­er­a­tion of view­ing options, while World Series rat­ings have declined by half over that same period.

Football’s advan­tage over base­ball isn’t about action and pace.  Dur­ing the 3 hours and 10 min­utes it takes to play the aver­age NFL game, the ball is in play for about 11 min­utes.   The remain­ing three hours, as George Will notes, con­sist of com­mit­tee meet­ings, com­mer­cials, half­time blath­er and lit­i­ga­tion, as games are halt­ed for inter­minable reviews of con­tro­ver­sial calls.

Foot­ball is beat­ing base­ball not because it offers non-stop action like hock­ey, but at least in part because its exec­u­tives have worked to gen­er­ate nation­al – as opposed to local or region­al — inter­est in the out­comes of its games. Con­sid­er that the nation’s sec­ond largest media mar­ket, Los Ange­les, has two major league base­ball teams, two NHL squads and two NBA fran­chis­es, but hasn’t had an NFL team since 1995.  No oth­er sport would think about snub­bing such a large mar­ket.  And yet peo­ple in Los Ange­les will watch the Eagles and the Bears on a Sun­day night (aver­age rat­ing of 12.8), while few would both­er to tune into a Phillies-Cubs Sun­day night tele­cast (aver­age rat­ing of 1.3).

MLB’s lead­ers have been every bit as bad as the NFL’s have been good.  Base­ball devel­oped as a sport of local alle­giances and its lead­ers did noth­ing to expand on that.  As a result, fans will watch their own teams, but show lit­tle inter­est in those from oth­er cities.  That’s a major rea­son why 8 or 9 times as many peo­ple watched the Super Bowl between the Ravens and the Saints  as the World Series between the Giants and Tigers.  The Series got stel­lar rat­ings in San Fran­cis­co and Detroit, but made scarce­ly a rip­ple in the rest of the coun­try.  The World Series has lim­it­ed nation­al appeal.

The NFL has labored suc­cess­ful­ly to win over new gen­er­a­tions of fans, while base­ball pri­mar­i­ly inter­ests peo­ple born before 1965.  Foot­ball is beer com­mer­cials; base­ball is Via­gra ads.  One poll found that only 8 per­cent of peo­ple aged 25–29 list base­ball as their favorite sport.  Anoth­er that 39 per­cent of self-described base­ball fans are aged 48–66 and that 29 per­cent are over 67.  When near­ly 70 per­cent of your fan base is over 48, you don’t have much of a future.

Baseball’s decline has been long, steady and abet­ted by inept lead­er­ship.  The Har­ris poll, which has been ask­ing Amer­i­cans their favorite sport for many years, found a vir­tu­al tie between foot­ball and base­ball in 1985: 24 per­cent chose foot­ball, com­pared with 23 per­cent for base­ball.  That has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly in the inter­ven­ing 28 years.  By 1992, the year Bud Selig became com­mis­sion­er, foot­ball had tak­en a 28–21 advan­tage, a larg­er, though hard­ly irre­versible, deficit.  Today, 21 years into Selig’s dis­as­trous tenure, more than twice as many fans list foot­ball as base­ball as their favorite (34–16).

And base­ball isn’t los­ing ground to foot­ball alone.  Few­er peo­ple now watch the World Series than the NBA finals.   Only 15% say they are very inter­est­ed in major league base­ball, com­pared with 26% who describe them­selves as NASCAR fans.

Minori­ties, like the young, are desert­ing base­ball.  When Jack­ie Robin­son broke the col­or bar­ri­er in 1947, he pre­cip­i­tat­ed a rapid rise in the num­ber of African-Amer­i­cans play­ing major league base­ball. Accord­ing to the league’s own fig­ures, blacks filled just under 20 per­cent of major league ros­ter slots from the 1970s to the 1990s.  That per­cent­age plum­met­ed dur­ing the Selig era.  Today it stands at 8.5 per­cent.   There were more play­ers born in the Domini­can Repub­lic on major league ros­ters this past open­ing day than African-Americans.

Base­ball now recruits a sig­nif­i­cant amount of tal­ent from out­side our bor­ders.  Over 28 per­cent of play­ers on those ros­ters were born out­side the US.  Selig’s defend­ers will point to that as a sign of the game’s vital­i­ty.  It’s more like­ly an index of the game’s dimin­ish­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty among Amer­i­cans.  Base­ball no longer attracts the best Amer­i­can ath­letes.  They end up in the NFL and NBA.

His apol­o­gists will also cite big region­al (as opposed to nation­al) TV con­tracts, high­er atten­dance fig­ures and new sta­di­ums as evi­dence of the sport’s endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty.   But all of this was bought with cap­i­tal that the game accrued over gen­er­a­tions.   An aging fan base that pre­dom­i­nant­ly con­sists of peo­ple in their peak earn­ing years and retirees has the dis­pos­able income to buy sea­son tick­ets and the free time to watch their local team on TV.  The new sta­di­ums, built with large infu­sions of gov­ern­ment mon­ey, tend to seat about 1/3 few­er peo­ple than the ones they replaced and mim­ick Baltimore’s Cam­den Yards, a retro struc­ture that evokes mem­o­ries of ball­parks that were demol­ished dur­ing the 1960s and 1970s.  A game whose newest mon­u­ments look to the ghosts of an ear­li­er age is not one that is fac­ing the future with confidence.

In ret­ro­spect, 1992 was a crit­i­cal year for baseball’s for­tunes.  That was the year that own­ers sacked Fay Vin­cent, who became com­mis­sion­er after his friend Bart Gia­mat­ti died sud­den­ly in Sep­tem­ber 1989.  Vin­cent, like the man he suc­ceed­ed, was an intel­lec­tu­al whose pri­ma­ry alle­giance was to the game, rather than to the team’s own­ers.  Such inde­pen­dence and high-mind­ed­ness didn’t wear well with own­ers, who were gird­ing for anoth­er round of labor nego­ti­a­tions.  So they replaced Vin­cent in 1992 with one of their own:  Mil­wau­kee Brew­ers own­er Bud Selig.

Selig retained con­trol of his fran­chise while serv­ing as “inter­im com­mis­sion­er.”  The move was appalling­ly short-sight­ed.  Instead of hav­ing a com­mis­sion­er who was an arguably neu­tral bro­ker in labor nego­ti­a­tions, Selig was both a union antag­o­nist and pre­sum­ably rep­re­sent­ing the game’s inter­ests in the talks.  The results were pre­dictable.  The strike that began in August 1994 last­ed 232 days and wiped out more than 900 games, includ­ing the World Series, an insti­tu­tion that had endured for 90 years and was played with­out inter­rup­tion through two world wars.

A sport already los­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty accel­er­at­ed its slide.  Over the years, the hap­less Selig man­aged ever more stun­ning fail­ures, shat­ter­ing the game’s rep­u­ta­tion and bleed­ing away its fan base.  Whether Selig was mere­ly obliv­i­ous or silent­ly com­plic­it in the steroid scan­dal may nev­er be known.  What is cer­tain is that he was an accom­plice in ruin­ing the rep­u­ta­tions of a gen­er­a­tion of the game’s bright­est stars and tar­nish­ing the sport’s most cher­ished records.

As base­ball lan­guished at the hands of Selig, the NFL was flour­ish­ing under the vision­ary lead­er­ship of able com­mis­sion­ers like Paul Tagli­abue and Roger Good­ell, who togeth­er built and expand­ed on Pete Rozelle’s work of cul­ti­vat­ing broad inter­est in their sport.  They have suc­ceed­ed as remark­ably as Selig has failed, giv­ing those who think CEOs are over­paid a sol­id talk­ing point: Selig col­lects $18.4 mil­lion per year, near­ly twice as much as Goodell.

One could argue, I sup­pose, that baseball’s decline was inevitable, that it would have lost ground to oth­er sports regard­less of who served as com­mis­sion­er.  Though it is the best defense one could mount of Selig, it is a weak one.  Fail­ure, like suc­cess, is sel­dom inevitable.  Lead­er­ship mat­ters in sports, in busi­ness, in pol­i­tics and gov­ern­ment.  Pre­em­i­nence in any field is hard to achieve and hard­er still to main­tain.  The slow hem­or­rhage of bad deci­sions may not be imme­di­ate­ly obvi­ous, but its effects become irre­versible with time.  Baseball’s par­lous con­di­tion result­ed from years of bad deci­sions made by bad lead­ers, none worse than its cur­rent commissioner.

The extent of the game’s decline came into focus this week when the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion pro­posed to repeal the black­out rule, which allows sports leagues to pro­hib­it the broad­cast of home games unless they are sold out.  The rule was first insti­tut­ed in 1961 when Con­gress enact­ed the Sports Broad­cast­ing Act at the behest of the NFL own­ers.  Unlike their base­ball coun­ter­parts, whose broad­cast­ing rights rest­ed (and, to a great degree, con­tin­ue to rest) on con­tracts between teams and their local media out­lets, foot­ball own­ers want­ed to con­tract with a sin­gle nation­al net­work to broad­cast all games.  Because tele­casts of home games could dis­cour­age atten­dance, they secured an antitrust exemp­tion from Con­gress that enabled them to estab­lish the local black­out rule as a league-wide policy.

Base­ball own­ers scarce­ly noticed.  In 1961, they had no real rivals.  Roger Maris had just bro­ken Babe Ruth’s sin­gle-sea­son home run mark, the game was expand­ing into new mar­kets, and a gen­er­a­tion of young stars, includ­ing African-Amer­i­cans like Willie Mays and Frank Robin­son, were cap­tur­ing the imag­i­na­tions of a young and bur­geon­ing gen­er­a­tion.  Base­ball reigned supreme.

The NFL, mean­while, couldn’t estab­lish suprema­cy in its own sport.  The upstart AFL was com­pet­ing for the best col­lege ath­letes.  The first Super Bowl wouldn’t be played until 1967.  The two leagues wouldn’t merge sched­ules until 1970.  No one could have imag­ined in 1961 that foot­ball would soon over­take base­ball in popularity.

The seeds of that cul­tur­al shift were sown in that 1961 leg­is­la­tion.  The NFL Com­mis­sion­er under­stood that foot­ball was a made-for-TV sport and that it was cru­cial for the league to con­trol its broad­cast rights.  The selec­tion of games and tele­cast times evolved into a sci­ence that NFL czars used to make it a tru­ly nation­al game.  It’s among the many good deci­sions that helped estab­lish football’s dominance.

And it’s one rea­son why you’ll tune in to the Eagles-Bears game tonight.