ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : After the Violent, Dark Winter Days of Football Comes Life-Affirming Baseball : When the Super Bowl and its hype fade away, it’s time for the poetry of contact between a ball and a perfectly swung bat.

This football season, like every football season in my memory, I’ve been forced to listen to flaccid assertions that football is really the National Pastime. On and on the sporting revisionists come, knuckle-draggers all, hawking and grunting and declaring that football is the benchmark of the American character, that Vince Lombardi was God, that having your knees wrenched into unrecognizable clots of destroyed sinew builds character, and that anybody who doesn’t think so is a pathetic sissy of a gutless commie coward.

This chest thumping usually reaches its most dull-witted crescendo about now. The Super Bowl, ancient Rome’s legacy to Madison Avenue, approaches, and the sap is beginning to rise in the sporting elite.

As the two teams claw their way to another uninspired yawner, millions of viewing fans will stuff themselves with hideous junk food, drown it all in an immense lake of cheap, gassy beer and slug each other happily during every play as they watch the fans in the stadium paint themselves green, cavort in Bart Simpson masks and reel drunkenly into the ushers.

No one should be an apologist for his country to the point of claiming this as the National Pastime.

Fortunately, the antidote is at hand: baseball.

Baseball players have already started voluntary workouts at Anaheim Stadium, and in about five weeks pitchers and catchers will be reporting to spring training camps and the glorious wheel of diamond life will begin to turn again. It will be transcendent.

There is nothing finer, truer, more hopeful, more thrilling, more inspiring, more gleeful, more life-affirming than hearing, as the last gritty days of winter reluctantly slink away, the first contact between a sizzling fastball and a perfectly swung bat. I like to think of that sound not as a simple crack, but as the report of the final nail being driven home in the lid of football’s coffin, at least for a few blessed months. Because, as anyone with hope in his heart and poetry in his soul knows, baseball is essentially, elementally better than football.

Baseball is to football what Beethoven is to rap, what George Burns is to Andrew Dice Clay, what chicken Marsala is to Chicken McNuggets.

Baseball is the sweet perfume of the outfield, supple leather and neatsfoot oil. Football is Ben-Gay. Baseball is Oil Can, Blue Moon, Shoeless Joe and Flash Gilhooley (yes, Flash Gilhooley). Football is Stosh, Bubba and Ickey. Baseball is aloha shirts on the sunny side of the park, hot dogs, cold beer and soft breezes. Football is frostbite at Soldier Field.

Baseball is a quick game of pepper. Football is contact drills. Baseball is Vin Scully. Football is Brent Musberger. Baseball is Casey Stengel and Tom Lasorda. Football is Woody Hayes and Vince Lombardi.

Baseball is believing with the Angels. Football is despairing with the Rams.

Baseball is going home with a home run ball you caught on a perfect summer day. Football is going home with a cold you caught in a blizzard.

Baseball is goofing around in the dugout and the bullpen, wearing your cap upside down or backwards, calling the third baseman “Bird Legs,” rubbing the manager’s bald head for luck. Football is grunting and growling and getting chewed out and slipping in tepid Gatorade.

Baseball is fun, joyous, abandoned, child-like in its purest form, an eternal kids’ game, loose and funny, a game for practical jokers, foolish dreamers, hopeless romantics, true believers, gregarious lovers of life. Football is war.

And I’ve heard enough about war.

But, thank God, somewhere the pitchers and catchers are stirring. The Super Bowl will be over soon.