CON: A Pitch From Two Sides

Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike.

Take off your tattered Arsenal cap and your cracked shin guards and No. 6 jersey for Scribes FC (proud runners-up in the Los Alamitos Park and Rec Men’s 30-and-Over Division) and return to a place you used to roam with feet firmly planted and head not blunted by too many headers.

That place is called Earth.

Welcome back. Not much has really changed since you left.

Football still rules this country, the kind of football that’s played with helmets and shoulder pads and lots of timeouts to make room for the car and beer commercials. Here we like our football players larger than life. All-Pro defensive lineman Richard Seymour weighs 310 pounds. That’s bigger than two Freddy Adus.

Basketball is a religion here, and we worship at the altar of Phoenix Suns 121, Dallas Mavericks 118. We love our scoring, one basket immediately following another, if not faster, disposable points for a culture based on everything disposable.

We can’t appreciate the deft sleight of foot required to create a soccer scoring chance that doesn’t result in a score.

We can’t relate to the emotional ebb and flow and the intricate tactical maneuvering that causes entire countries to swoon over a 1-nil soccer result.

Subtlety?

Isn’t he the French point guard who’s supposed to be an NBA lottery pick?

It took baseball awhile, about a century or so, but it finally caught on. American sports fans in 2006 don’t want craftily pitched 2-1 ballgames. We want Cleveland Indians 12, Chicago White Sox 8 — and let’s pretend we’re deeply disturbed about steroids.

Soccer can’t compete on this landscape, not until they change the rules to make each score worth six points and let players use their hands and encourage them to sling the ball around the field as if it’s David Beckham’s handbag.

Oh, right. We already did that. It’s called the NFL.

Soccer in America has too many things going against it. For one, chewing tobacco is not involved. No exhaust fumes either. You occasionally get them in European soccer, but that comes mainly from the visiting team’s bus high-tailing it out of town after stealing a 2-1 win from the home side on a dubious penalty.

You have it right when you say that Americans want to watch the best in the business, the biggest names in the sport.

Who’s the biggest name in Major League Soccer? That league based its entire 2004 preseason marketing campaign on Adu, a strategy that tanked its credibility. Come On Out And See Freddy . . . Sit The Bench.

Who’s the best player in MLS? Landon Donovan? He has been a dominant force for the Galaxy and the San Jose Earthquakes, but when he took his game to a higher level, to the German club Bayer Leverkusen, he was a bust in two stints.

MLS got a truckload of publicity last year when Beckham came to Los Angeles to plug his new soccer academy and let slip — wink, wink — that he wouldn’t mind playing in America one day. That may or may not happen, but if it does, Beckham probably will be in his mid-30s. Same for Ronaldo, who recently said he’d like to end his career playing in the United States.

Isn’t that where pro soccer in this country got into trouble the first time around? When the North American Soccer League said bring us your aging, your over-the-hill, your one-time greats yearning to break free and coast into retirement . . . and the league fizzled out amid general disinterest in the mid-1980s?

That was soccer’s chance to stake a claim in the football-baseball-basketball news cycle. The NASL peaked pre-ESPN, unlike NASCAR, the NBA and the NFL, just to name three sports entities MLS will forever be chasing in this country.

And about those FIFA world rankings: I think we can both agree that computer formula is crocked.

If the U.S. truly is the fifth-best team in the world, why are we consensus picks to finish third in our four-team World Cup group — behind the Czech Republic and Italy and ahead of Ghana?

The U.S. is ranked seven slots ahead of Italy. Anyone who actually believes the U.S. will beat Italy on June 17 in Kaiserslautern, please raise your right hand.

Bruce? Bruce Arena? It’s OK to take your hands out of your pockets now.

And you, Mike, let me end this with something I told you four years ago, and four years before that, and four years before that.

Get well soon.