Now Baseball and Football are different from one another in other kind of interesting ways I think. First of all, Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game. Football is a 20th century technological struggle. Baseball is played on a diamond in the park, the Baseball Park. Football is played on a grid iron in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything is dying. In Football, you wear a helmet. In Baseball, you wear a cap. Football is concerned with downs. What down is it? Baseball is concerned with ups. Who’s up? Are you up? I’m not up. He is up. In Football, the specialist comes in to kick. In Baseball, the specialist comes in to relieve someone. In Football, you receive a penalty. In Baseball, you make an error. Whoops!
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, blocking, piling on, late hitting, unnecessary roughness and personal fouls. Baseball has the sacrifice. Football is played in any kind of weather, rain, sleet, snow, hail, mud, can’t read the numbers on the field, can’t read the yard markers, can’t read the players numbers, the struggle will continue.
In Baseball, if it rains, we don’t come out to play. “I can’t come out to play. It’s raining out.” Baseball has a 7th inning stretch. Football has the two minute warning. Baseball has no time limit. We don’t know when it’s gonna end. We might have extra innings.
Football is rigidly timed and it will end even if we have to go to sudden death. In Baseball, during the game in the stands, there is kind of a picnic feeling. Emotions may run high or low, but there’s not that much unpleasantness. In Football, in the stands, during the game you can be sure that at least 27 times you are perfectly capable of taking the life of a fellow human being, preferably a stranger.
And finally the objectives of the two games are totally different. In Football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general. To be on target with his aerial assault riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing his aerial assault with a sustained ground attack, which punches holes in the forward wall of the enemies’ defensive line.
In Baseball, the object is to go home, and to be safe. I hope I’ll be safe at home, safe at home.
-George Carlin
OH MAN that George Carlin skit doesn’t get old LOL!
Baseball is the only sport where the defense has the ball.