The sportspages were filled recently with both football and baseball news. Football captured our attention with stories about the heroics of quarterbacks Joe Burrow of the Cincinnati Bengals, Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills, and Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs, as they all dominated NFL playoff games that weren't decided until the very last second. Then, later in the week, baseball took over the headlines with the election of David Ortiz and the non-election of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens to the Baseball Hall of Fame. It's rare when baseball can compete with football for attention at this time of year, when all eyes are glued to the football playoffs, but the news is not all good for baseball aficionados. Far from it, in fact.

Burrow, Allen, and Mahomes represent the future for the NFL. They should be around, making life miserable for opposing teams for another decade or more. Mahomes, the eldest of the trio at 26, is already an established star while Burrow and Allen, both 25, are just coming into their own. Ortiz, Bonds, and Clemens, on the other hand, are all figures from the past, whose careers are well behind them. Clemens, 59, and Bonds, 57, are both more than 30 years older than all three quarterbacks while Ortiz, a Johnny-come-lately at 46, is only 20 years their senior. The point is that baseball has no stars of their magnitude to replace them. And it certainly has no stars with wattage of quarterbacks like Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, or Mahomes.

When I was a kid, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial were huge stars, the biggest in the firmament. They were instantly recognizable to everyone in America. They were as big or bigger than even movie stars like Cary Grant or John Wayne. They could not walk down any street in the country without being recognized. Today's biggest baseball star is considered to be Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels. If he were standing right next to you would you have any idea who he was? Neither would I.

Baseball continued to have its superstars if not quite with celebrity status of DiMaggio, Williams, and Musial. It had Mantle and Mays and Hank Aaron and Reggie Jackson. It even had Clemens and Bonds, but the steroids era took a tremendous toll on the game and on its star-making power. Years of bad publicity have turned off young fans and they no longer look toward baseball for the athletes they want to emulate. It's all about the football quarterbacks now. Football admittedly has tweaked the rules over the years to the passers' advantage and they are now a protected species. But fans want to see the action they generate and the continuing popularity of the game reflects that.

If a quarterback is successful in the NFL, he is automatically a superstar. Mahomes has already achieved that status. Burrow and Allen are at the doorstep, and they are not alone.

The league is filled with great young talent, and business is booming.

And we've hardly even touched on the subject of Tom Brady yet. Football is fortunate that he came along when he did. He and others like Peyton Manning and Drew Brees made the world safe for all the quarterbacks who have followed them. It's like it was 100 years ago when Babe Ruth started hitting all those home runs and changed the game of baseball forever. But that was a century ago. We have seen football change from three yards and a cloud of dust into an action-packed game of passing in our lifetimes. When I was young, the great stars of the game were the running backs. Names like those of Jim Brown, Paul Hornung, and Frank Gifford captured most of the headlines. Their quarterbacks, Otto Graham, Bart Starr, and Y.A. Tittle mattered, but not as much as today's young studs.

Football has changed over the years because it's paid attention to what its audience wants. Fans want action. They want to see wide receivers make spectacular one-hand catches; they want to see quarterbacks with rifle arms hitting moving targets many yards downfield. Football is delivering those things and it is reaping the benefits. The game is not without its shortcomings, but it is more popular than ever, and it is making money hand over fist for everyone concerned.

Baseball, on the other hand, has not marketed itself nearly as well. It hasn't listened to its audience. People don't want to sit through four-hour games; they don't want to see more strikeouts than base hits. We old timers sit through it and shake our heads sadly, remembering when it was a better, more fan-friendly game. But at least we sit through it. Young fans -- boy there's an oxymoron for you, "young fans" -- I'm not sure they even exist anymore. I have a friend who bought tickets to the 2018 World Series. His plan was to take his sons to see the Red Sox and Dodgers play. He expected that they'd be thrilled to see a series game in person, as he'd been when his father took him to a World Series game back in 1986. He was sorely disappointed but not shocked when they turned down his invitation because the Patriots game was on TV that night.

Now we have to sit by and watch while labor and management squabble over how they are going to divvy up the billions of dollars in proceeds baseball generates every year. It's not like either side is being cheated; it has to do with what each side wants, which is more for itself. Baseball is not in danger of going out of business, it's too ingrained in our culture for that to happen. But it is in danger of those proceeds shrinking; it's in danger of fading in importance. The evidence is that's already happening.

- Dick Flavin is a New York Times bestselling author; the Boston Red Sox "Poet Laureate" and The Pilot's recently minted Sports' columnist.