It now occurs to me that I may have been deluding myself. This past Sunday, Boston’s beloved Red Sox were in Yankee Stadium for what loomed as their biggest game of the year, poised to sweep the hated Bronx Bombers and move within a half game of first place. And at the very same hour the New England Patriots were suiting up to open their season on the road against Buffalo, a longtime division rival, but hardly one to inspire the kind of visceral antipathy stirred up by the Yankees. I’ve never heard–and can’t imagine I ever will–a “Buffalo sucks” chant from Boston fans. (Perhaps that would be regarded as piling on.)

So Red Sox-Yankees in the heat of the pennant race vs. the Pats-Bills season opener. No contest, right? Right! The Patriots game thrashed the Red Sox contest, doubling up on the BoSox in the TV ratings. More remarkably, that margin never changed appreciably throughout the afternoon, despite the fact that the Pats were out of their contest by halftime en route to a 31-0 drubbing while the Red Sox dueled the Yankees 0-0 into the seventh inning. And so it was throughout the nation, wherever a baseball team fighting for its postseason life took on its football neighbor head to head on the little screen: the Rams over the Cardinals in St. Louis, the Giants over the Yankees in New York, the Vikings over the Twins in Minnesota.

There is some irony in the fact that this football rout was on at a time when, finally, baseball is having the kind of season that has put America in thrall to the NFL. You know the NFL formula for success: kick up new contenders each season and keep everybody–at least everybody but Cincinnati and Arizona–in the playoff hunt until the final weekend of the season. That kind of crapshoot is supposed to be far beyond the reach of Major League Baseball, where the races are decided early, even before the very first game, by payroll discrepancies. So how do you figure that, entering the home stretch, 16 baseball teams have legitimate shots at reaching the playoffs, including doormats from the 2002 season like the low-payroll Kansas City Royals and the historically cursed Chicago Cubs?

The wild-card entry into the playoffs has been part of baseball for almost a decade now, but never has it worked out so deliciously. That probably comes as a bit of a shock to baseball traditionalists, who have always regarded the wild card as second only to the designated hitter in contributing to the ruination of Western civilization. The wild card does have one huge potential pitfall. If two teams are in a tight division race and both are certain to make the playoffs, what should be a thrilling duel becomes relatively meaningless. If tied on the final day of the season, both teams would surely hold their pitching ace in reserve for the first game of the playoffs rather than squander him in a bid for the meager home-field advantage.

But that isn’t the case this year. Four of the six divisions are barn-burners, including tight, three-team races in both the AL and NL Central divisions. And none of the eventual losers are guaranteed a wild-card playoff spot. Furthermore, in both division races that are runaways, the NL East and West where Atlanta and San Francisco hold double-digit leads, there would be zero interest elsewhere without the wild card. With it, however, fans in L.A., Philly, Arizona and Florida can still dream of winning it all, just like Anaheim did from its wild-card perch last year.

Most baseball fans, indeed pretty much fans in every city except the Yankee faithful with their Steinbrennerian mentality, are not remotely greedy. They simply want to still be in the hunt come September, freeing them to fantasize about those impossible dreams. A championship in Boston for the first time in 85 years, slaying once and for all “The Curse of the Bambino.” Another Subway Series, but this one a North Side-South Side affair in Chicago. A first series appearance for Houston or Seattle.

I have seen no evidence that the suits–especially the head suit, Bud Selig–at Major League Baseball have any insight or foresight. Otherwise, they could never have been deluded that it is home runs and home-run records, trashing the game’s cherished traditions, that is the game’s ultimate draw. I grew up able to recite baseball’s hallowed numbers: 56, 60, 190, .406, 511. Sure baseball got a boost from the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa record chase. But now, five years later, I’d be surprised if your typical fan can remember exactly how many homers McGwire hit.

That’s because it’s not the homers, not the rock-and-roll blasting from the speakers, not even the thrill of dancing mascots or sausage races. It’s the competition, stupid. And now that Major League Baseball finally has a competitive season to rival anything the NFL has offered, even its blind squirrels should be able to find this acorn. But to the extent that Selig does recognize the primacy of competition, his pleas for equity will always be viewed as conflicted by his family’s failed stewardship in Milwaukee. Baseball can’t afford to wait for Selig’s planned retirement a few years hence. It needs inspired, new leadership that can build on the genuine, not manufactured, excitement of this season. Baseball will never supplant football in America. But there’s no reason that it can’t provide compelling entertainment for lots of folks besides me and the sentimentalists among my geriatric friends.