When people decide not to watch an allegedly important baseball game on television, it's time to summon up the apocalyptic visions for the old game. Nobody cares, it's boring, kids these days can't stand it. Video games, wrestling, the target demographic isn't there.

When people decide not to watch an allegedly important football game on television, they just chose not to watch. Pretty simple: The game was on, but they chose to do something else. Oh, they still love the game. They live for it, actually, and they'd be lost without their officially licensed NFL helmetphone.

Whatever the case, be assured the sport had nothing to do with it, and neither did the game. The NFL is our nation's only infallible entity. Monday Night Football ratings were lower than a year ago (Dennis Miller would call this "an irony of Sisyphean proportions, with a side of Charlemagne") but the news accounts didn't engage in the knee-jerk predictions of extinction for the league. No, it was just a game that some people watched and others didn't.

Baseball doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt, probably because it has done nothing to deserve it.

This is yet another instance of baseball losing the perception war. The players and owners have done such a poor job of marketing the sport that people reflexively assume the worst. When the commissioner and his owners make a habit of verbalizing the worst, what's the option?

The NFL promotes the perception of the league as exciting and fun and riotous, generally a drunken, porcelain-hugging good time. Even when the game is as thoroughly bad and unwatchable as Steelers-Patriots on Monday night. But baseball, under the starchy and bumbling reign of Bud Selig, is perceived as old-fashioned, slow and very nearly necrotic.

(Baseball's best player, Alex Rodriguez, is publicly known more for his $252 million contract than for his ability. This, of course, is a direct result of the owners' multi-year anti-PR campaign.)

Overall, baseball ratings are better than they were a year ago, despite all the bad publicity over labor strife and steroids. They're better even though so many pundits and provocateurs are determined to spread dread like fertilizer.

Get ready for baseball's new ad campaign, ready to hit the airwaves leading up to the playoffs. It will include depictions of your favorite players as "puffed-up cartoon characters," according to one account.

What a stroke of genius. Big, puffy, hypertrophic big-leaguers with size 9 heads hitting the ball a mile. Will Ken Caminiti narrate? Maybe for the World Series they can run some spots of Manny Ramirez singing a medley of his favorite songs. While standing in the batter's box, being thrown out from deep short.

This Week's List

Class: Houston's Brian Hunter, whose remorseful response to hitting Kaz Ishii with a line drive was devoid of the usual we-just-play-the-game platitudes that come from most athletes who inadvertently injure someone.

In light of the Ishii incident, there's one thing that should be reconsidered whenever possible: Late-afternoon starts, which are dangerous for both hitter and pitcher.

Think of him as a performance artist, Browns fans, and maybe it won't hurt so much: Dwayne Rudd.

There's only one logical reaction to the ugly and unlikely ending of the Bucs-Saints game: Tom Tupa, still active?

His offense, apparently, was brutal honesty: Keith Hernandez apologized for writing an Internet column stating the Mets have no heart and "quit a long time ago."

Just like Eric Crouch, only different: If Byron Leftwich doesn't turn out as an NFL quarterback, the team that drafts him can always switch him to defensive tackle.

Wisconsin, where vegans and PETAns rule both policy and discourse: The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to include a "Soybasa" sausage in the Brewers' Sausage Race at Miller Park.

They're rare, but sometimes we have fashion questions: Were those Mardi Gras beads George Bush the Elder was wearing on the sidelines before the Steelers-Pats game?

Insiders say as soon as he finishes his Civil War Reenactment Fantasy Camp, he'll shave it off: Bill Cowher's beard.

Why God invented picture-in-picture: This week, with Dodgers-Giants and A's-Angels working simultaneously.

Weird how this happened: The Dodgers, likable.

Sure he got popped, but the guy got caught and Wells just might decide to apply for the man's job: The guy who apparently sucker-punched David Wells was suspended from his job as a bartender.

Next on Dateline -- "The Hidden Dangers of the 15,000-Square Foot House": The Hawks' Theo Ratliff had to call out a three-person search party (himself, his wife and, of course, the cook) to find his 4-year-old daughter after she went AWOL for more than an hour after leaving to change into her swimsuit.

As a public service, we offer this opinion as to why the Colts -- making noise about moving to Los Angeles -- should ease up on their whole Westward Ho! thing: From Baltimore to Indianapolis to Los Angeles seems a bit drastic; maybe they should first move to Salt Lake City, in order to leave something other than Honolulu open as an option in case the L.A. thing doesn't work.

And finally, you know what they say about expansion teams -- the team is always ahead of the folks in the press box: After inhaling the heady air of the inaugural win over the Cowboys, a Houston sportswriter wrote, "The Texans came out like old-time gunslingers, their six-shooters blazing, and served notice there was a new marshal in town."

Tim Keown is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at tim.keown@espnmag.com.