Is baseball dead?

This may be the week baseball died.

It isn't even baseball season. Pitchers and catchers haven't reported. The hopes of springtime are two months away, maybe more. But baseball may have died nonetheless over last weekend.

It wasn't because of all the strikeouts last year, though there were a lot. Nor was it because of the home runs, which seemed to multiply exponentially. Nor about the fielding shifts, which have gone from novelty to nonsense in the course of two seasons. Nor about the contract negotiations because, like everything else about the sport, they are slow. Nor about the price of a beer and a hot dog, which was stratospheric before we gave a moment's thought to inflation.

It was because of Joe Burrow, Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen -- and even Jimmy Garoppolo. Plus three placekickers who won games in the last moment. They all but killed baseball, or at least rendered its death assisted suicide.

It was because the country was gripped by all four of those quarterbacks, and by some portion of the games they garlanded with their special courage and grit, games that had heroics, surprises and comebacks. The contests were dramatic, the players attractive, the unfolding of the games compelling -- even though a Wall Street Journal study once found that an NFL game consisted of only 11 minutes of actual action.

It was because the games, particularly the one in snowy Green Bay, were played in harmony with the weather, even when it was brutal -- not delayed for hours while the concession stands remain open and the tarpaulin is rolled up and then unrolled, and maybe up again.

Overall, it was because of what happened while baseball slept. And because of how baseball has become a sleepy game whose onetime greatest attraction -- that it had a rhythm all its own, happily out of sync with modern times, a game without a clock for a fan base just as happy to have time stand still -- is becoming its death knell.

I write this with sadness, having loved the old game since I was a boy, taking pleasure in its pace, seeing beauty in its paces, relishing visiting it in its various places -- the Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field and Tiger Stadium of old, and the splendid new palaces of the game in Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis. But it was ancient Fenway that grabbed me, the ballpark where I witnessed a no-hitter for my first game, a one-hitter for my first World Series, and countless frustrating afternoons (for that is when baseball should be played) when the ninth-place Red Sox lost even to the Washington Senators and Kansas City Athletics. I date myself, but then again, my love for the game is dated. I am not alone.

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My friend Jim Collins played college ball and then wrote one of the great books about the summer game, ranking with "The Summer Game" by Roger Angell. It was "The Last Best League," about a summer in the Cape Cod League. The other day, in the wake of the greatest weekend in football history, we commiserated about the state of the game we once loved. Like me, he still marvels at the players' athleticism, the rallies, the closer leaving the winning run on third base. But, he says, "I'm starting to ask if those moments are enough to keep me engaged for a whole drawn-out game -- let alone a long season."

And he told me this: "I'm an old-school romantic baseball fan, and every year the game gets less romantic and less enchanting."

To be sure, football has flaws and, like its players, they are large:

• The wild card games were clunkers, with two storied teams, the Steelers and Patriots, rolling over and dying.

• The NFL overtime rule, which denied the Bills a chance to touch the ball after the breathtaking regulation performance of their quarterback, is so unreasonable that even the coach who profited from it, that wise owl Andy Reid, the chief of the Chiefs, thinks it should be junked.

• Don't overlook sex crimes.

• Even with improved NFL concussion protocols and more protective equipment, players are still suffering head injuries, concussions and, for some, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease of the brain.

• There are moments when watching football on television can bring a new meaning to tedium in a broadcast medium; how many times can you watch that AT&T same-deal-for-everyone ad? (How to beat that: Set your DVR to record the game. Retrieve your recording an hour after kickoff. Speed past the commercials. You'll arrive at the fourth quarter in pretty much real time, and you'll save enough time to read the Sunday paper.)

This is what happened while baseball slept: Sunday night, two teams scored 25 points in two minutes. Last weekend, four games were decided in the last play of the contest.

To be sure, baseball games can end on the last play, and sometimes they do. All of Pittsburgh knows what occurred at 3:36 p.m. on Oct. 13, 1960, when Bill Mazeroski hit a walk-off home run to beat the New York Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series.

But note the details: That game took two hours, 36 minutes. (The average game last year took three hours, 10 minutes.) In 1960, the seventh game occurred on Oct. 13. (The 2020 World Series ended on Oct. 27, and the series was one game shorter than the 1960 series.)

The old chestnut in American politics used to be that the public doesn't really focus on a presidential election until after the World Series. In 2020, that gave them eight days to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Voters had 26 days to choose between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

There breathes no more fervent a baseball fan than George F. Will, the columnist who once dismissed football as a classic phenomenon of the modern age: committee meetings followed by violence. But Will conceded last summer that "the quality of the game as entertainment is declining." A friend of mine once took his preteen daughter to a baseball game and, sometime around the fifth inning, she asked, "Dad, when does the game begin?"

This may be the week that baseball died. It is dying with no one at its deathbed, with no one noticing, maybe with no one caring. Baseball has a choice: Will it be rest in peace -- or rise and shine?

David Shribman, a Pulitzer Prize winner in journalism, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.