As many have noted, particularly with the World Series going on (did you know the World Series was going on?), baseball is in the midst of a decades-long decline in popularity. Over the same period, football has been on the upslope. Why is that? Dave Bry, writing at the Guardian, tenders an explanation:

Football is a violent, territorial sport that rewards brute strength over everything else and symbolises, at its base level, imperialism, bloodlust, and corporate capitalism’s tendency to flatten any and all eccentricity into bland, cog-in-the-machine homogeny. . . .
How many wars has America fought over the past 50 years? How many of them still rage on in one form or another? How many quagmires do we find ourselves stuck in? Pax Americana? “Peace through superior fire power?” How much harm have these lies done in the world? How much harm have they done to us? Might makes right in this ugly worldview, as it does in football.

After dilating on international affairs, Bry adds, too, a word about matters domestic:

Watch a group of defenders tackle a running back at the line of scrimmage. The swarming, the pile-on – do we have a better metaphor for the “tyranny of majority”, the great danger De Tocqueville warned us of way back in 1835?

I agree with Bry that one can learn something about a society from considering its games — but he goes about the study all wrong: namely, by starting from his political outlook and looking for cultural artefacts to support it (adding, along the way, a general sneering quality directed toward football and its fans). Football players are “more Stormtrooper than human,” but baseball players are engaged in “micro-battles of wit, timing and accuracy.” Each swing of the bat or slide into second radiates a grace that elevates the soul. For the record, I am a fan of both sports (and with certain of Bry’s praises for baseball I agree), but Bry certainly offers the most generous interpretation to events on the diamond and the least generous to those on the gridiron.

That said, a more important point is this: It requires a mechanical cast of mind to eagerly reach for “metaphors” and “symbols” like Bry does. Football “symbolizes” imperialism and is a “metaphor” for the tyranny of the majority — as if sports are simply hermeneutical keys by which to interpret other phenomena, in this case geopolitical strategy. Labored connections like that should be left to tenure-bait academic papers.

As it happens, I took up the subject of football and violence recently for the print edition of National Review. Indulge a quote:

In an age when tee-ball leagues refuse to keep score and P.E. dodgeball is denounced as “murderball,” it makes sense that, as a Harris poll found earlier this year, professional football is far and away Americans’ favorite sport (and college football is third). Tuning in on Sunday afternoon does not have to be a matter of bloodlust; perhaps Americans simply still appreciate the strength and grit and fearlessness that football — increasingly alone among pastimes — celebrates.
And celebrates not merely pro forma. The manly charm of football is that it involves real, actual danger. Strength and grit are on display because there is danger, because it requires grit to run for the end zone knowing eleven other players are hurtling themselves at you. . . . Baseball can be elegant and contemplative, basketball can be swift and gymnastic — but they cannot be tough the way football is tough. And critics who think we, as a species, have moved past “tough” are fooling themselves.

By contrast, according to Bry, baseball is — of course — “tolerant.”