Loud and violent, football roars past antiquated baseball.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

MIAMI _ Football is here, arriving with all the subtlety of a million thundering buffalo, so baseball will be knocked out of the way now with brute, snorting force. About all you need to know about how completely and absolutely football's behemoths overpower even baseball's steroid freaks is this:

A few weeks ago, a tense baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and Atlanta Braves, a game with pennant-race implications that was decided on a walk-off home run by Gary Sheffield, lured fewer TV viewers than a sloppy 16-6 exhibition game between the Jets and Steelers. American viewers prefer a one-quarter glimpse of a bored Jerome Bettis and Curtis Martin to nine full and dramatic innings from two of baseball's best teams, prefer even meaningless football to anything in baseball that might actually matter.

So antiquated baseball keeps putt-putting in the slow lane, left blinker perpetually on, bifocaled Bud Selig straining and squinting from behind the wheel as souped-up football whizzes by with a whoosh, fast and furious.

Baseball ruled this land once, but now our national pastime feels past its time in more ways than one, especially when juxtaposed with the spectacular testosterone bursts football weekends provide. We are not the same America that embraced baseball as its national game back in the summer of 1941, not nearly, and that's why football has replaced baseball as our favorite sport. Well, that and betting.

If that television screen indeed provides the frame for where we are as a culture, you ought to be horrified that there was one thing, and only one thing, that outdrew that Steelers-Jets exhibition slop on cable television the second week of August. That was professional wrestling. Baseball, meanwhile, was outdrawn by a variety of things, including something about dark secrets on The Lifetime Channel. The viewer has changed, but baseball hasn't; so the game's pace, once considered charming and quaint and conversational, now merely feels slow.

Football, big and loud and violent, fits the America that surrounds it. It is by far the most television-friendly of our sports, and it requires very little attention span from the generation raised on MTV, video games and the Internet. Helps, too, that you get spectacular and choreographed violence when your attention does happen to be engaged.

For your viewing entertainment, those football players will walk with a limp 10 years from now and won't be able to shake hands or pick ...