Victims of a Lassa fever epidemic are being burned in piles, winter is a distant memory, and elective euthanasia is available at doctors’ offices. Parts of the Southwest are a lawless region called the Disputed Lands. Baseball attendance is down because “a bad flu season and rolling Medicare outages” are killing off its aging fans. In a poll of American 10-year-olds’ 100 favorite sports teams, the most popular major league team is 81st, behind a fifth-ranked Italian soccer club.

Even as satire, it’s a lot of weight to put on a sports comedy that’s essentially a character study, and longtime fans of “Brockmire” may not be happy with the changes. As the episodes skip from one opening day to another, and as Brockmire’s successive strategies to revive the game — colored bats! Classic Baseball! — flame out, the level of savage energy and inventiveness aren’t what they were before.

And while the focus of the humor has always been on Brockmire’s dysfunction and his deliciously profane and literate rants, delivered by Azaria with splendid aplomb, the new season demonstrates how important the actual presence of baseball — as engaged in on the field or seen from the announcer’s booth — has been to the show. That’s because there is none in Season 4, which takes place almost entirely in boardrooms, apartments and bars. (Maybe the budget didn’t allow for setting up at a ballpark and hiring extras.)

But the show still has Brockmire, of course, which is to say it still has Azaria, who created the character for a video short on Funny or Die in 2010. The concept — a middle-aged, insecure man-child whose narcissism and disdain for the world are undercut, and given a kind of backhanded nobility, by his sentimental attachment to baseball — holds up. (It’s a very male thing, and seven of the nine credited writers for the season, as well as the director, Maurice Marable, are men.)

The gentler side of Brockmire comes through more this season, as his sobriety holds and he unexpectedly becomes a single father, reunited with his Filipino-American daughter (a new character played by Reina Hardesty). He’s also reunited with his old flame, Jules (Amanda Peet), the baseball junkie whose mercenary streak and epic drinking give even Brockmire pause. Together they fill the strong-woman role that the show has always required, someone to take care of the big baby at the center of things.