Mike Celizic

The Twins are quite a baseball team. So are the Rockies, the Phillies and the Angels. If baseball’s fondest wishes were granted, none of them will get to the World Series.

This isn’t a put-down of teams I enjoy watching. It’s merely a fact. Times are tough and baseball needs to put on a big show that will suck in fans from across the nation, pull attention away from the NFL, put up big ratings and remind everyone that this is still America’s pastime. It needs the kind of postseason match-ups that will make the game the center of conversation in offices and chat rooms and bars.

What it needs is the Yankees and the Dodgers in the World Series.

That would be the best, with Manny Be Manny and Uncle Joe Torre and A-Rod and Jee-tah on the field, a passel of A-list celebrities in the stands and squads of paparazzi at the exits eager to follow everybody into the night.

Yankees-Cardinals would be OK, as would Red Sox-Dodgers or Red Sox-Cards. Either one of those match-ups will at least get the attention of a nation that lives on celebrity and a familiar story line. Those are second-tier matches, but good ones.

And then, once baseball gets the great match-up, it needs a great series that goes the limit. No four-game sweeps. No five-game yawners. A seven-game barnburner full of thrills and chills and controversy.

This is a problem with baseball. The game rarely gets to showcase the thrill of a seventh-game, winner-take-all game. The NFL doesn’t have any other kind of playoff game; everything is one-and-done, so we can’t afford to ignore any of them. Baseball gets them just a couple of times a decade — if we’re lucky.

And the seven-game series that involve marquee teams are rarer still. The last one we had was in 2001, when the Diamondbacks beat the mighty Yankees in a terrific series.

The following year, the Angels won a seven-game thriller against the Giants, and the difference in the audience was enormous. New York-Arizona averaged a 15.7 rating; Angels-Giants averaged 11.9, which equates to roughly 5 million fewer viewers.

This has nothing to do with the worthiness of small-market teams. Any team that makes it to the Series deserves to be there. It’s just that worthiness isn’t the same as watchability.

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It has everything to do with our celebrity-sodden culture. People get excited over big names and famous teams.

They also want ready-made drama. If they have to think about why they’re supposed to care, they aren’t going to bother. Health care is too much to comprehend and that involves how long we’re going to live — and how well. So people aren’t going to bother figuring out why they should care about the Phillies or the Twins. It’s too much work and detracts from Tweeting.

Real fans will scream that they don’t care about what’s good for ratings or what stokes the fires of casual viewers. To them I say go ahead and scream. Nobody cares about you, because the guardians of the game know you’ll be there for better or for worse. It’s everybody else the bean counters care about.

And those people have to have marquee teams or a delicious matchup. Or they’re simply not watching.