But this is about more than money or sports. It’s about a societal shift away from a certain kind of America where baseball made sense — where it was just so naturally and obviously illustrative of who we were as a people. Today, we are changing— and fast. Yet baseball is changing very little. It’s as if baseball can’t keep up, particularly for an increasingly distracted and impatient people.

Technology is changing the way we receive and process information, making it more difficult to focus, especially on a slow-paced game like baseball. We lack patience. We check our email 150 times a day. We play with an iPad while we watch Game of Thrones. All while being asked to fidget through 200-minute, molasses-like baseball games. Baseball simply struggles to work in a world of instant gratification.

But this shift doesn’t just vivify America’s devolving ethos when it comes to the realities of technology on the human experience. It also underscores a hypocrisy in the nation’s ethic of violence.

The link between the crushing violence of football and brain disease is clear. But we still watch — and more than ever.