It’s that we now live in a country in which we call baseball the “national pastime” only for sentimental reasons. As documented in an opinion piece yesterday in the WSJ:

Major League owners like to boast that attendance at their games, except for the recent recession, has increased. But with the disappearance of hundreds of minor league and semi-pro teams—and thousands of teams in almost every town, factory, prison and military post across the land—interest in baseball and attendance has plummeted overall. Soccer has superseded baseball in suburban parks, and basketball has replaced stickball in the cities.

Gone are the days of the early 20th century when (as Harold and Dorothy Seymour point out in their book “Baseball: The People’s Game”) scores of young Detroit businessmen would wake before sunrise to play in “Early Risers” baseball games, 25,000 turned out to watch a New York City high-school baseball championship, and Chicago laid out 4,000 municipal ball fields.

Baseball’s popularity has fallen here but has risen in other countries. Most Americans have heard how every Dominican boy yearns for his first baseball glove. Less well known is that in Japan there are two national high-school baseball tournaments that fill Japanese television screens for days every year, or that 40,000 fans turn out for even a practice by the national team.

A decline in American dominance on the field has accompanied the decline in national interest. It’s not merely the welcome entry into the major leagues of Dominican stars such as Albert Pujols and David Ortiz or Japanese stars such as Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui. Years ago, Babe Ruth led touring teams of major leaguers to Japan and the Caribbean, where they promoted baseball and won games against host teams by lopsided scores.

Today when the best teams from different countries play each other, the Americans lose. In the two recent World Baseball Classics in 2006 and 2009, the American teams, though led by stars like Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter, didn’t even make the finals. Japan and Korea dominated, featuring mostly players who have never competed in the United States. Japan won both Classics…

Those other countries appreciate baseball the way we once did. What happened to us?

George Carlin, whose comedy I often found disappointing in his later years, really had a point with his monologue about baseball vs. football. For all the reasons he cited and others, a country that prefers football to baseball is a country that has lost something precious at its core.

All my life, I’ve felt left out because I didn’t live through the 1940s. I usually explain that in terms of, being a communitarian, I feel deprived having missed a time when, whatever our differences, we felt fully invested as a people in a common endeavor, a time when “We’re all in this together” practically went without saying.

But maybe the essence of what I missed was the nation’s devotion to baseball, and all that that said about us.

Ah, well — it’s spring. We just had Opening Day. And in April, in baseball, hope springs eternal. The national pastime may be in the cellar now, but there’s always the chance of recapturing the pennant…