The old ballgame: baseball is increasingly a thing of the past. What happened to the national pastime?

Mr. Smith is a radio commentator, university lecturer, former speechwriter for President Bush, and author of seven books, including the current Windows on the White House and Voices of the Game.

NOT long ago America seemed umbilically attached to baseball. Hitting fungoes, citing batting averages, trading a dozen Red Sox playing cards for a dog-eared Mickey Mantle -- young males thought of little else.

"In our youth," recalls NBC's Bob Costas of the Fifties and early Sixties, "baseball was everything." By day, my friends and I forged pickup games. At night, we turned to baseball the way a heliotrope turns toward the sun. Traversing the dial, you heard Mel Allen and Curt Gowdy and Lindsey Nelson and Ernie Harwell. Each of these Voices affirmed baseball as the finest game in the land.

The archetypal announcer was Harry Caray. It might be! Sport's Jackie Gleason. It could be! The man who made "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" half-anthem and half-command. It was! Caray's banter wafted into small shops and gas stations and gentle back yards. His death last month led millions to weep -- for Caray, and his game.

In the Eighties, Caray became a patch of folklore on superstation WGN-TV -- rasping, "You can't beat fun at the ol' ballpark." This, although fun has largely fled baseball -- popularity, too. Today's kids wear grunge shirts, buy Dennis Rodman jerseys, and seem allergic to baseball's gentle rhythms. Caray was beloved because he believed in a splendid arcadia -- baseball as it once was, and we pray can be again.

For Caray, baseball was a way of life, not a diversion. And until about the last decade, most Americans agreed. Like jazz and Broadway, baseball was a peculiarly American institution -- so much the quintessence of America that in World War II Japanese soldiers, charging our positions, cried, "To hell with Babe Ruth!" A decade later, Dwight Eisenhower was scorched for missing Opening Day (he had stayed at his retreat in Augusta, Ga., to play golf); as President, he never missed another.

"That's how it was," Caray told me recently, "and anyone who says otherwise has a lousy memory." As a small boy, I aped the Yankees' Bobby Richardson. Others picked Luis Aparicio, a palatine at shortstop, or Ted Williams, John Wayne in baseball woollies. Each October, the World Series became a U.S. town meeting. Classes erupted as Ted Kluszewski homered, or Yogi Berra showed that as a "bad-ball hitter" he could summon good.

Forget the old saw that in spring a young man's fancy turns to love and baseball. Recall that just a decade ago, according to Gallup, baseball barely trailed the NFL as the nation's favorite sport. How did it fall so far, so fast?

One cause is organized baseball itself. Many owners are bottom-lining Hessians. Stupidity compounds their greed. The late Edward Bennett Williams owned the baseball Orioles and football Redskins. "What's dumber than the dumbest football owner?" he'd ask. "The smartest baseball owner."

Pro football markets itself better than Frank Capra did World War II. By contrast, baseball spurns national promotion. In 1990, it killed its sole network grandstand -- TV's Game of the Week. (The revived Game begins when the season is already two months old.) The sport hasn't had a commissioner since 1992. Its 1994 - 95 strike aborted one season and truncated another, and killed the World Series for the first time since 1904. Moreover, the World Series is now all prime-time. How can kids fall in love with a game if they're asleep when it's played?

In a Lou Harris poll in 1964, 48 per cent of Americans named baseball their favorite sport. This year, says Gallup, 17 per cent did. From 1954 to the early '80s, TV Guide hailed each season with a cover preview. In 1993, an inside story asked, "How did the sport become a second-rate TV draw?" In 1994, Sports Illustrated asked kids aged 9 to 12 which sport they preferred reading about. The NBA beat baseball, 57 to 17 per cent. In 1996 and '97, the World Series' Nielsen rating was barely half of 1980's 32.8.

Even Acting Commissioner Bud Selig says: "In the Forties and Fifties, baseball had DiMaggio, Williams, and Jackie Robinson. That kind of dominance by today's players doesn't exist." Baseball has too few stars and not enough young fans. Says the Indians' Dwight Gooden, noting how NBA sneakers are everywhere: "I don't see kids walking to school in baseball spikes."

Baseball's decline also stems from the Nineties' cesspool culture. The Nineties celebrate taunting and trash-talking. Baseball evokes a Mayberry of picket fences and unlocked homes. The Nineties move to the non-stop cross-cutting of music videos. Baseball is rational and leisurely (imagine -- time to think between pitches!). The Nineties disdain history. Baseball prizes tradition and salutes its long-gone heroes.

The late Bart Giamatti called baseball "an unalloyed good." Conceivably the game could still thrive by touting itself as a sanctuary from our attention-deficit-disordered time. Instead, it tries to mime the age, a foolish, hopeless task.

"Every business has a cardinal rule," Caray observed. "Don't be something you're not." He knew what kind of baseball worked -- real grass, chitchat between pitches, riveting announcers, and parks heavy with individuality. He also knew what kind didn't work --domes, mascots, and rap music between innings.

"Baseball forgot what made us fall in love with it," Costas says. Football is weekly, an event. Baseball is daily, a fact of life. Basketball is a greyhound you thrill to. Baseball is a cocker spaniel who steals your heart.

Perhaps we are no longer capable of admiring a game more poetic and cerebral than slam-bang or cutting edge. Caray didn't think so. Nor did Giamatti, who loved its variety. A student once asked about the NBA. "Young woman," he replied, "I will not talk about thumpety, thumpety, thumpety, swish!"

Recently, Caray was reminiscing about FDR's edict to keep baseball alive in World War II. "Imagine," he told me in his whiskied voice. "Hitler couldn't kill baseball. Tojo couldn't kill baseball. But baseball" -- and perhaps America -- "could."