Classic Baseball Writing: "99 Reasons Why Baseball is Better Than Football"

The Heart of the Order (New York: Doubleday, 1990) | First published: January 1987 | Thomas Boswell

[Maven]

Heck, most of the highlights are homeruns. A homerun swing lasts about two seconds, and if you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all. Then the hitter trots casually around the bases. It can't compare to a broken-play scramble by Steve Young, each of which is a something different.

You have an unhealthy obsession with homeruns and highlight reels.

And if you'd ever seen Reggie Jackson hit a homerun, you would never say that they all look alike.

Maven

[Right_Wing_Mole_In_Seattle]

Any chubbette with a stick can play Baseball.
Football requires precision and skill; where Baseball requires knowing how to spit and when to scratch.

Batting is the most difficult skill in any major sport. Pitching is probably second.

Do you think you could catch a ball thrown by an NFL Quarterback? You probably could.
Do you think you could get a hit off of a major league pitcher? Probably not.

[IowaHawk]

The worst thing about baseball? Those misty-eyed, pencil-neck apologists - George Will, Thomas Boswell, Steven Jay Gould, Doris Kerns Goodwin - wannabe faculty geeks who see in it a grand metaphor for western civilization.

Ahh, yes, baseball; a mystic frolicking pastorale, a Apollonian paean redolent of the symbolic symbolism endemic in the elysian sine qua non of youthful sybarritic yada yada yada.

Gag. Baseball is narcolepsy on grass, a 19th-century schoolyard game craftily designed to minimize any distracting excitement. I hear that hoop-rolling and mumblety peg were big in 1894, too.

[Husker24]

okay, you got me with the marching band thing, it gives you some time to take a whizz and pop some microwave popcorn though.

[BluesDuke]

Any chubbette with a stick can play Baseball.

Spoken like someone who never could lay the wood on a good fastball or a big breaking curve ball. (You want to talk about chubbettes, take another look at the behemoth hippopotami known otherwise as football teams.)


Football requires precision and skill

The only precision and skill required for football are knowing how much time one has before being piled upon by cannibals disguised as athletes; or, knowing precisely when to stop driving the teeth into the skin before hitting a bone; or, at maximum level, the proper dismemberment, disembowelment, and amputation techniques. (Boswell: Baseball players chew tobacco. Football linemen chew on each other.) Sideways-booting kickers don't count. Refer to Alex Karras: "Most of them come back off the field saying, 'I keek a touchdown'."

...where Baseball requires knowing how to spit and when to scratch.

Only if you're Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton, Tommy John, Mike Scott, Joe Niekro, Rick Honeycutt, Rick Rhoden, Kevin Gross, just about the entire Oakland Athletics starting rotation of 1980-83, Bo Belinsky, Lew Burdette, Bob Purkey, Whitey Ford, Preacher Roe, Eddie Lopat, Hugh Casey, Burleigh Grimes, or any other pitcher who ever mastered and threw the spitball with regularity. (Mike Flanagan, Baltimore Orioles pitcher, showing Thomas Boswell a fresh baseball, then drawing four identical gashes into the smooth spot with a coat hanger: "Any time I need five new pitches, I got 'em.")


There is no comparison; Football is for the warriors among us; Baseball is for everyone else.

Gang warriors, maybe. Baseball is the thinking person's (warrior and otherwise) sport. Underline sport


Where would this nation be without it's warriors?

Doing what it should have been doing in the first place - properly defending her citizens from predators at home (real predators; no vice mongers, please) and enemies from abroad. In case it escaped your notice, the Founding Fathers didn't exactly intend for the United States to sustain standing armies. The Constitution, construed strictly, allowed for raising armies and a navy, not entrenching them. Football players aren't warriors - they're cannibals passing off as warriors.


Baseball is a game.

Thank God! If I want to watch organised terrorism, I can go to South Central L.A. (for the minor leagues and the cheap seats) or the Middle East.


Football is life and death.

Well, you do have a point. Football players spend more time trying to kill each other than play a game of mind and skill. And if you think football fans are the most civilised creatures on this island earth, you sure haven't been to many games in rock-ribbed college football towns (not to mention the Oakland Raiders)...


Carlin's missed maxim, again: Football - sudden death. Baseball - extra innings.

Better yet: Football is for collectivists. Baseball is for individualists.

[BluesDuke]

I have no intention of starting a death match.

Unless you happen to be supervising the coin toss at any Oakland Raiders game, you won't be starting any death match.

[BluesDuke]

The difference is clear; one can also PLAY Baseball with a can of beer and an obese gut.

Yes. And he was one of the first five inductees into the Hall of Fame. (His name was Babe Ruth.)


In football, one would be sucking wind after the first play.

Since football basically sucks, one should think that an appropriate response. Besides, one usually sucks wind in football not because of running but because of being piled upon by about five thousand pounds of refugee flesh from Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.

[BluesDuke]

Gag. Baseball is narcolepsy on grass, a 19th-century schoolyard game craftily designed to minimize any distracting excitement. I hear that hoop-rolling and mumblety peg were big in 1894, too.

OK, Congressman Gephardt, stop being a wisenheimer!

[OrioleFan]

More good baseball books appear in a single year than have been written about football

True, but "Fatso" by Art Donovan was a riot.

[BluesDuke]

True, but "Fatso" by Art Donovan was a riot.

OK, that leaves football with about 899 books to go to catch up, I would imagine...*wink*

[2Trievers]

You have a way BD ... the melding of the words you use ... to captivate ... when are we going to resume? ... sans accent grave here ...

[IowaHawk]

Dukey, Dukey. Unlike a truly bad movie, baseball can't even be enjoyed on an ironic level.

Not that I disagree with you about the NFL; I can do without the whole bombast schtick. I'll stick with my top 3 -

1. College Football
2. College Basketball
3. Auto Racing

[BluesDuke]

Dukey, Dukey. Unlike a truly bad movie

Now, now, no fair, no fair - baseball should not be judged by Safe At Home alone. (I still can't believe Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris actually consented to star in that turkey!)


baseball can't even be enjoyed on an ironic level.

Like there are ironies in football (who can love a sport which is played on something resembling a jail window, considering especially that enough of its players spend as much time in jail as on the 40-yard line these days), auto racing (look - if I want to see reckless driving, I don't have to watch the Daytona 500...anyone who lives contiguous to Los Angeles and cannot find reckless driving just doesn't get out much anymore!), or basketball (what's the big deal about men running around in their underwear - which is what Anna Quindlen once said was the real beauty of basketball; though, in fairness, she did say it before the advent of the abominable WNBA - in hot pursuit of a slam dunk?)

I would rather watch a game played on a diamond backed by a theoretically endless green field where the object is to come home. They don't come home in football, basketball, auto racing, hockey, soccer, golf (please - in golf, they speak of birdies, eagles, bogeys, lies, drivers...what is this, a game or an Audubon Society convention?).

[BluesDuke]

Now I know why men play this game - it's not because they like it, it's just to get away from their wives! - Ralph Kramden, on golf.

[cybertoolzz]

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 recievers 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 this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line. In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! "I hope I'll be safe at home!"

didnt u get this from GEORGE CARLIN?? i think BOTH of these sports are bogus - i play on-line COUNTER-STRIKE professionally - football puts me to sleep and baseball puts me in a COMA.

[Alabama_Wild_Man]

"If you think money hasn't taken over college football"

NCAA = No Cash At All...

...and I've yet to see the first 'Pro'fessional anything - play with with anything near the level of Pride in most of the majority of collegiate sports....

[MarkL]

29. Every outdoor park ever built primarily for baseball has been pretty. Every stadium built with pro football in mind has been ugly.

NOT TRUE!!!! Arrowhead Stadium, where the KC Chiefs play, is a beautiful stadium!

Mark