The other night, at precisely 11:47 pm, Albert Pujols lifted a Brad Lidge slider high into the Houston sky. Capping off a miraculous comeback that kept the Cardinals alive, game 5 of the NLCS immediately entered the pantheon of great playoff moments. Except for one problem.

I didn’t see it.

If you go to sleep at a decent hour like me, you haven’t seen any of the great moments of this postseason. Baseball long ago prostituted itself to its advertisers, but there was an implicit understanding in all the corporate muckety-muck: this was a traditional game, a world away from the late-night madness of Monday Night Football.

No longer. In the rush to maximize ratings and squeeze every dollar out of its long-suffering fans, baseball has broken the pact that defined the sport for generations. “Prime-time” baseball is an ugly stain on sports. Yet baseball officials insist that the hype is overblown. After all, it’s only fans in the east who have a reason to gripe.

Apparently, there’s even this new invention called the Central Time Zone. I must have missed the memo! As the World Series begins – featuring two teams out in that anonymous fly-over netherworld – you can be sure that we’ll all risk our health if we want to see who wins.

Fox isn’t solely complicit in its attempt to wreck the game. The Cardinals closed out the Padres two weeks ago in a game that started at 11:00 PM Eastern – a start time requested by ESPN, which had an important college football game to televise.

You’d think that ESPN, having destroyed the tradition of Saturday college football, could have moved that game to a Tuesday or something, just to show how seriously it takes academics. Instead, the Padres and Cardinals were banished to TV Siberia, and it’s no wonder San Diego played demoralized baseball. The only people watching were perverts, insomniacs, and even a few people who don’t write for the Daily News.

Baseball needs to do something, and soon. Not wanting to glorify delinquency, I can’t support day games, such as those that were the norm in my youth. In this day and age, would kids listen to Mel Allen on transistor radios, the way I did? Fat chance. Disruptive young punks would use October baseball matinees as an excuse to skip school and loiter about shiftlessly, grabbing their crotches and smoking crack on public transit. Kids these days could care less about the World Series; they don’t even put their baseball caps on straight anymore, and they won’t even buy them in the first place unless they come in unofficial, gang-related colors. Would a disciplinarian like Joe Torre let his players take the field in camouflage Yankees caps like those worn by crack-affiliated rapper Young Jeezy?

But the harsh reality of TV is that ESPN could have done better showing marathons of “Playmakers” than that Padres game. We’ve lost all respect for the things that once defined our culture. It isn’t enough that sports serve as a stage for the deification of pill-popping thugs. It’s just that we’d all rather watch WWE pay-per-views than America’s pastime. And without public outcry, baseball will keep pushing the envelope. ESPN and Fox both do their best to obscure the game itself behind wall-to-wall graphics and whooshing sound effects. The older generation had Vin Scully and Harry Caray. In the 21st century, we have Stuart Scott the talking knucklehead and Scooter the talking knuckleball.

Boo-yah, indeed.

Phil Mushnick is a columnist for the New York Post.