Bad Football Beats Good Baseball

The 0-4 Cowboys and the 0-4 Redskins spend three hours committing unspeakable crimes against the game of football while the Yankees complete an unthinkable off-the-mat comeback against the A’s in the divisional playoffs ... and the NFL bashes baseball in the national TV ratings.

The Eagles and the Giants spend three hours imitating air travelers trying to check their luggage at JFK while the Yankees finish off the winningest team in American League history to clinch their fourth consecutive pennant ... and the NFL wins the ratings scrimmage again.

As it always does, whenever the NFL on one major network goes head-to-head with baseball on another.

How is this possible?

Why does this happen?

Space is limited, so we will restrict discussion to the first 20 reasons that come to mind:

1. Television screen: rectangle. Football field: rectangle. Baseball field: diamond-shaped infield with sprawling, amorphous outfield. It’s a square-peg, round-hole thing.

2. Sports fans are simple creatures of habit. NFL: Always on Sunday, on Fox, on CBS; always on Monday, on ABC, at 6 p.m. Baseball: Is it on Fox? Is it on Fox Family? What is Fox Family? Does it have anything to do with the Fox Family Guy? Do you watch the Fox Family Guy? Hasn’t TV animation gone to hell in a handbasket? Do you have Fox Family? Do you know anyone who has Fox Family? What day is the game? What time is the game? When will the game end? They just got into the Diamondbacks’ bullpen--the game may never end.

3. Sports fans like to be surprised. NFL: Browns over Ravens? Bears in first place? Tom Brady out-passes Peyton Manning? Baseball: Yankees win again.

4. If it’s true, as baseball’s owners complain, that the “small markets can’t compete,” then why should we bother? The last two NFC teams to win the Super Bowl play in Green Bay and St. Louis. New York was routed in the last Super Bowl. Since 1990, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Tennessee have appeared in six Super Bowls. Baseball? Yankees win again.

5. The Arizona Diamondbacks?

6. In order to inject more life into a moribund game, baseball juiced up the ball, looked the other way while the players juiced themselves, put a team in Colorado and kept thinning pitching staffs until your average major league game looked no different from your average rally-round-the-keg weekend slo-pitch game. When the NFL wanted more offense, it rolled out the St. Louis Rams.

7. Future sports historians will remember 2001 as the year Barry Bonds chased the single-season home run record and Emmitt Smith chased the all-time rushing record. And whom did you root for?

8. Thom Brennaman and Steve Lyons do not work NFL games.

9. The Angels do not play in the NFC West.

10. In the World Series, pitchers will bat in the games played in Arizona but the designated hitter will be used in the games played in New York. In the Super Bowl, pass interference isn’t a 15-yard penalty when the AFC champion has the ball and a point-of-infraction foul when the NFC champion has the ball.

11. The World Series is irrelevant. This we learned in 1994, when baseball’s owners and players decided they didn’t need to play one.

12. The NFL would never cancel the Super Bowl because it honestly believes the Super Bowl is as important to Americans as Christmas. Although, admittedly, a scheduling conflict with the national auto dealers’ convention has yet to bump Christmas back to New Year’s Day.

13. Work stoppages. Fans hate them, baseball can’t get enough of them--with one more, on deck, coming to a ballpark near you in 2002. The NFL last had a work stoppage in 1987 and learned its lesson. No one wants to watch another movie as bad as “The Replacements.”

14. Unless the only other available option is listening to James Earl Jones’ “Field of Dreams” soliloquy one more time.

15. With the notable exception of the XFL, Americans can never get enough football--which explains the coming expansion draft to stock the Houston Texans. This weekend, baseball unveils its showcase event, the Yankees versus the Diamondbacks for the championship of North America, and the headlines read: “BASEBALL PLANNING TO FOLD EXPOS, MARLINS.”

16. On the following piece of evidence alone, which sport is lacking a franchise in major-market Los Angeles/Orange County? Baseball: No postseason victories by the home teams since 1988. NFL: Four postseason victories by the home teams since 1988.

17. Kurt Warner to Isaac Bruce or Brian Anderson to Damian Miller. You make the call.

18. No one writing about the NFL ever wrote that the sport’s “time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our father’s youth, and even back then--back in the country days--there must have been the same feeling that time could have stopped.... You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly.”

19. Disney does not own an NFL team.

20. George Will is someone who would rather watch baseball than the NFL.

George Will also wrote, “I like Sports Illustrated’s baseball issue even more than its swimsuit issue.”