Football, especially NFL football, has oversaturated the media for fifty years. While baseball has to be followed on the radio or in the newspaper (aside from special subscriptions on the Internet and on television), ever single freaking game of the NFL is on regular cable/satellite/network TV.
As the country has progressively secularized the Superbowl and "Super sunday" have become a national "holy day," superseding all others. Even the other networks assume that everyone's going to be watching "The Game" and schedule their shows in accordance with this, even creating special "halftime shows."
Furthermore, NFL football is not family fare and hasn't been for a very, very, very long time (and the Superbowl is the worst). It's an ugly, brutal, violent game highlighting the absolute worst in American life ("violence punctuated by committee meetings")--especially as played by the professionals. I've never seen the appeal . . . ever.
Plus of course the rules are so bizarre and esoteric. What kind of game is played in five second spurts? Or so thoroughly regulates simply passing the ball? Football players may be stereotyped as dunces, but as far as I'm concerned anyone who can follow the complicated rules of this game is a genius.
Compare this with baseball, the Great American Game, a mystical touchstone of all Americans regardless of race, religion, or political ideology. Look at its mythology, its history. See the beauty of a game that rivals chess with regard to strategy, that has no mandated violence, and that, played as it is without reference to a clock, could theoretically go on forever.
It's baseball that ought to have every game on television where we can all see them--provided they get rid of interleague play, the designated hitter, astroturf, and put the Brewers and Astros back in their correct leagues. Oh, and split MLB into two distinct organizations again.
If the MLB was popular enough it would be everywhere. The NFL understood TV better than any other sport in the early days, that’s why they dumped the local contracts and went national (though note, only the primetime and playoff games are broadcast truly nationally, the Sunday afternoon games are regional). It’s really a matter of knowing the market. It also helps football that it has the exact same structure as dramatic TV. Drama writing for a long time was ruled by “the rule of 3”: tell them what you’re going to show them, show them, tell them what they just saw. Which exactly matches the TV announcers predicting the play, then the play, then they explain the play.
Of course some of it is a matter of what you know about the game. You complain that football is about 5 second bursts, but that’s really only if you don’t understand the game, people who follow the game know that a “play” really starts with who gets put on the field, personal selections, presnap reads, adjustments by both sides to what they think the other side is doing, those are things that actually decide who is going to win the “burst”. For those who really understand the game often times the “burst” is kind of anti-climactic, it’s the least interesting part of the whole play.
And those who don’t understand baseball can lodge the same criticism of baseball. For the uninitiated baseball is the pitcher shaking his head a lot and then the “burst” of the pitch, which usually doesn’t get hit, and even if it does it’s all over in 10 seconds tops. Those who understand the game see it differently, but those who don’t see baseball the same way you see football.