Baseball is Big Business now. Another high-powered, high-priced entertainment option that’s little different in terms of its cultural importance from some top-ticket floor show at a Las Vegas casino.

Has baseball lost much of the magic and mythology that once connected generations of fans to the National Pastime? Absolutely. Do the owners of the Washington Nationals, for example, who enjoyed a sellout crowd at the home opener in their new $611 million stadium this week, worry about some intangible aura that baseball fans once believed enveloped their diamond heroes? No way. They’re too busy calculating all the revenue streams the new park will generate, even for a club that’s likely to finish far down in the National League standings.

For me and millions of fans whose coming of age included the rituals of attending baseball games with our fathers, there’s a sense of loss. For the millions of kids who no longer have any clue about the joys of days spent playing “sandlot ball,” there’s a bona fide loss. But for Major League Baseball owners and management, the only “losses” they worry about are the occasional rainout that postpones yet another payday.

And even that will become a relic of the past once the remaining cities that haven’t already done so get browbeat into forking over multi-millions in tax revenues to fund another retractable-roof palace for their very own friendly, neighborhood billionaire owner.

Responsibility? To the fans? Are you kidding me? MLB — as well as every other pro sports enterprise — could care less about its responsibility to anything other than the black ink they use to calculate their bottom lines.