Some people say football's the best game in America.  Others say baseball.  Some people are really dumb.  Some people say all this is just a matter of taste.  Others know better.  Some people can't wait for next Sunday's Supper Bowl.  Others wonder why.  Pro football is a great game.  Compared with hockey.  After all, you've gotta do something when the wind chill is zero and your curve ball won't break.  But let's not be silly.  Compare the games?  It's a one sided laugher.  Here are the first 99 reasons why baseball is better than football.
 

  1.  Bands.

  2.  Half-time with bands.

  3.  Cheerleaders at half-time with bands.

  4.  Up With People singing "The Impossible Dream" during a Blue Angels fly over at half-time with bands.

  5.  Baseball has fans in Wrigley Field singing, "Take me out to the ball game" at the seventh inning stretch.

  6.  Baseball has the Babe, Catfish, Joltin' Joe and Splendid Splinter.  Football has Lester the Molester, Too Mean and the Assassin.

  7.  All 33 Super Bowls haven't produced as much drama as the 1997 World Series.

  8.  Baseball has a bullpen coach blowing bubble gum with his cap turned around backward while leaning on a fungo bat; football has a defensive coordinator in a satin jacket with a headset and a clipboard.

  9.  The Eagles have 13 assistant coaches, 5 equipment managers, 3 trainers, 2 assistant GM's, but, for 16 games nobody could score a touchdown.

10.  Football players and coaches don't know how to argue with a ref.  Baseball players kick dirt on him and Earl Weaver even use to steal third base and not give it back.

11.  Vince Lombardi was never ashamed that he said, "Winning isn't everything.  It's the only thing."

12.  Football coaches talk about character, gut checks, intensity, and reckless abandon.       Tommy Lasorda said, "Managing is like holding a dove in your hand.  Squeeze too hard and you kill it; not hard enough and it flies away."

13.  Big league baseball players eat sunflower seeds.  Pro football players eat each other.

14.  No record in football comes close to the prestige of any record in baseball.

15.  Before a baseball game, there are two hours of batting practice.  Before a football game, there's a two hour traffic jam.

16.  A crowd of 30,000 in a stadium built for 55,501 has a lot more fun than a crowd of 55,501 in the same stadium.

17.  No one has ever actually reached the end of the rest room line at an NFL game.

18.  Nine innings means eighteen chances at the hot dog line.  Two halves means bring your own or go hungry.

19.  Pro football players have breasts.  Many NFLers are so freakishly overdeveloped, owing to steroids, that they look like circus geeks.  Baseball players seen like normal fit folks.  Fans should be thankful they don't have to look at NFL teams in bathing suits.

20.  Eighty degrees, a cold beer and a short sleeve shirt are better than thirty degrees, a hip flask and six layers of clothes under a lap blanket.  Take your pick:  suntan or frostbite.

21.  Having 162 games a year is 10.125 times as good as having 16.

22.  If you miss your favorite NFL team's game, you have to wait a week.  In baseball, you wait a day.

23.  Everything George Carlin said in his famous monologue is right on.  In football you blitz, bomb, spear, shiver, march and score.  In baseball, you wait for a walk, take your stretch, toe the rubber, tap your spikes, play ball and run home.

24.  Marianne Moore loved Christy Mathewson.  No woman of quality has ever preferred football to baseball.

25.  More good baseball books appear in a single year than have been written about football in the past fifty years.  The best football writers, like Dan Jenkins, have the good sense to write about something else most of the time.

26.  The best football announcer ever was Howard Cosell.

27.  The worst baseball announcer ever was Howard Cosell.

28.  All gridirons are identical; football coaches never have to meet to go over the ground rules.  But the best baseball parks are unique.

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

30.  The coin flip at the beginning of football games is idiotic.  Home teams should always kick off and pick a goal to defend.  In baseball, the visitor bats first (courtesy), while the host bats last (drama).

31.  Baseball is harder.  In the last twenty-five years, very few men have been cut from the NFL and then become a success in the majors.  However, baseball flops have become NFL standouts quite regularly.

32.  Face masks.  Right away we've got a clue something might be wrong.  A guy can go 80 mph on a Harley without a helmet, much less a face mask.

33.  Faces are better than helmets.  Think of all the players in the NFL (excluding your local team) whom you'd recognize on the street.  Now eliminate the quarterbacks.  Not many left, are there?  Now think of all the baseball players whose faces you know, just from last year's playoffs.

34.  Football has Tank and Mean Joe.   Baseball has the Georgia Peach and Charlie Hustle.

35.  In football, it's team first, individual second--if at all.  Offensive lineman can play for ten years--but when would we ever have time to study them alone for just one game?  Could we mimic their gestures, their tics, their habits?  A baseball player is an individual first, part of a team second.  You can study him at length and at leisure in the batter's box or on the mound.  On defense, when the batted ball seeks him, so do our eyes.

36.  Baseball statistics open a world to us.  Football statistics are virtually useless or, worse, misleading.

37.  No one, not even Einstein could figure out how configure the quarterback ratings system.

38.  No moment ever has or ever will compare to Mark McGwire's 62nd homerun.

39.  What kind of dim-bulb sport would rank pass receivers by number of catches instead of by number of yards?  Does baseball give the silver bat to the player with the most hits or with the highest average?

40.  Can you really explain why if there's 60 minutes on the clock that the game takes 3 hours?

41.  There is nothing like the split second of time after the pitcher has gotten his sign and before he throws the pitch.

42.  David Wells threw a perfect game last year.  There is nothing in football like it.

43.  Baseball has one designated hitter.  In football, everybody is a designated something.  No one plays the whole game anymore.  Football worships the specialists.  Baseball worships the generalists.

44.  The tense closing seconds of crucial baseball games are decided by distinctive relief pitchers like Trevor Hoffman or Rod Beck.  Vital NFL games are decided by helmeted gentlemen who come on for ten seconds, kick sideways, spend the rest of the game keeping their precious foot warm on the sidelines and aren't aware of the subtleties of the game.  Half of them, in Alex Karras' s words, run off the field chirping, "I kick a touchdown."

45.  The Detroit Lions still haven't figured out that if they had an offensive line, Barry Sanders would rush for 3,000 yards.

46.  In baseball, you can get close enough to the field to actually see the players.  In football you need binoculars.

47.  Paul Simon sang, "Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?" not, "Where have you gone Knute Rockne?"

48.  Watching Tony Gwynn hit a baseball is pure pleasure.

49.  Parity scheduling.  How can the NFL defend the fairness of deliberately giving easier schedules to weaker teams and harder schedules to better teams?  When a weak team with a patsy schedule goes 10-6, while a strong defending division champ misses the playoffs at 9-7, nobody complains.  Baseball would have open revolt at such a nauseatingly cynical system.

50.  Baseball has no penalty for pass interference. (This in itself is almost enough to declare baseball the better game.)  In football, offsides is five yards, holding is ten yards, but interference:  maybe fifty yards.

51.  Nobody on earth really knows what pass interference is.  Part judgment, part acting, mostly accident.

52.  Baseball has no penalties at all.  A home run is a home run.  You cheer.  In football, on a touchdown, you look for flags.  If there is one, who's it on?  When can we cheer?  Football acts can all be repealed.  Baseball acts stand forever.

53.  Instant replays.  Just when we thought they were gone, they brought them back.  Human error is supposed to be part of the game.

54.  The NFL's style of play has been stagnant for decades.  Turn on any NFL game and that's just what it could be--any NFL game.  Baseball teams' styles are often determined by their personnel and even their parks.

55.  Football fans tailgate before the big game.  No baseball fan would have a picnic in a parking lot.

56.  At a football game, you almost never leave saying, "I never saw a play like that before."  At a baseball game, there's almost always some new wrinkle.

57.  Beneath the NFL's infinite sameness lies infinite variety.  But we aren't privy to it.  So what if football is totally fascinating to Dan Marino as he tries to decide whether to audible to a quick trap?  From the stands, we don't know on thousandth of what's required to grasp a pro football game.  If an NFL coach has to say, "I won't know until I see the films,"  then how out-in-the-cold does that leave the fan?

58.  Football has the Refrigerator.  Baseball has the Wizard of Oz, Tom Terrific, and Pudge.

59.  While football is the most closed of games, baseball is the most open.  A fan with a score card, a modest knowledge of the teams and a knack for paying attention has all he needs to watch a game with sophistication.

60.  Football is impossible to watch.  Admit it:  the human head is at least two eyes shy for watching the forward pass.  Do you watch the five eligible receivers, or the quarterback or the pass rush?  If you keep your eye on the ball, you never know who got open or how.  If you watch the receivers . . . well, nobody watches the receivers.

61.  The NFL keeps changing the most basic rules. Most blocking now would have been illegal use of the hands in Jim Parker's time.  How do we compare eras when the sport never stays the same?

62.  If a quarterback is outside the tackles on the offensive line, then he can throw the ball away and it's not intentional grounding.  Why?  Is he in more danger outside the pocket or is it just another stupid rule to protect the quarterback.

63.  In the NFL, you can't tell the players without an Intensive Care Unit report.  Players get broken apart so fast we have no time to build up an allegiance to stars.  Three quarters of the NFL's starting quarterbacks are in their first four years of the league.  A top baseball player lasts 15 to 20 years.  We know him like an old friend.

64.  The baseball Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown, NY, beside a beautiful lake.  The football Hall of Fame is in Canton, OH beside the highway.

65.  Baseball means Spring's here.  Football means Winter's coming.

66.  The best book to trapped on a desert island with -- The Baseball Encyclopedia.

67.  Baseball has a drug problem comparable to society's.  Pro football has a range of substance abuse problems comparable only to itself and maybe the Hell's Angels.

68.  Baseball enriches language and imagination at almost every point of contact.  As John Lardner put it, "Babe Herman did not triple into a triple play, but he did double into a double play, which is the next best thing."

69.  Who's on first?

70.  Without baseball, there'd be no Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, without football there would be no astro turf.

71.  Baseball is smart enough not to televise its draft because it would be boring.  Football seems to think that it's an important two day event.

72.  Baseball has no clock.  Yes, you were waiting for that.  The comeback, from three or more scores behind, is far more common in baseball than football.

73.  The majority of players on a football field in any game are lost and unaccountable in the middle of pileups.  Confusion hides a multitude of sins.  Every baseball player's performance and contribution are measured and recorded in every game.

74.  Some offensive lineman in the NFL wear dark plated Plexiglass visors inside their face masks--even at night.  "And in the third round out of Empire University, the 49ers select Darth Vader."

75.  Someday, just once, could we have a punt without a penalty?

76.  End zone spikes, sack dances, and dirty birds.

77.  The Super Bowl started at 6:30 last year.  The pre pre game show started at 12:00.

78.  In baseball, fans catch foul balls.  In football, they raise a net so you can't even catch an extra point.

79.  Nothing in baseball is as boring as the four hours of ABC's Monday Night Football.

80.  Buddy Ryan once gave himself an A+ for his handling of the Eagles and said he didn't make any mistakes.  His 5-10-1 Eagles were 7-9 the year before.

81.  Football players, somewhere in their development learn to talk like football coaches.  They say, "Our goals this week were to contain Terrell Davis and control the line of scrimmage."  Baseball players say things like, "This pitcher's so bad, when he comes in, the grounds crew drags the warning track."

82.  Football coaches walk across the field after the game and pretend to congratulate the opposing coach.  Baseball managers head straight for the beer.

83.  If it's snowing and raining and the wind is blowing 50mph, baseball players have enough sense to stop playing and go drink beer.

84.  Quarterbacks have to ask the crowd to quiet down.  Pitchers never do.

85.  Baseball nicknames go on forever--because we feel we know so many players intimately.  Football nicknames run out fast.  We just don't know that many of them as people.

86.  The Super Bowl is held in a neutral site every year which could be thousands of miles away from either team's home.

87.  Football has two weeks of hype before the Super Bowl.  Baseball takes about two days off before the World Series.

88.  In football, because each game is so important, it minimizes a sense of humor.  Knowing you'll lose at least sixty games a season makes self-deprecation a survival tool.  As Casey Stengel said to his barber, "Don't cut my throat.  I may want to do that myself later."

89.  Football is played best full of adrenaline and anger.  Moderation seldom finds a place.  Almost every act of baseball is a blending of effort and control; too much of either is fatal.

90.  Football's real problem is not that it glorifies violence, though it does, but that it offers no successful alternative to violence.  In baseball, there is a choice of methods; the change-up or the knuckle ball, the bunt of the hit-and-run.

91.  Baseball is vastly better than on TV.  Only when you're in the ballpark can the eye grasp and interconnect the game's great distances.  Will the wind blow that long fly just over the fence?  Will the relay throw nail the runner trying to score?  Who's warming up in the bullpen?  Did the base stealer get a good jump?  The eye flicks back and forth and captures everything that is necessary.  As for replays, most parks have them.

92.  Turning the car radio on on a summer night.

93.  George Steinbrenner learned his baseball methods as a football coach.

94.  In baseball, the season takes place in one year.  If a team won the World Series in 1989, you know when they won the World Series.  In football, if a team wins the Super Bowl in 1989, does that mean they won it in January 1989, or they are the champs from the 1989 season.

95.  You'll never see an idiot with his whole body painted at a baseball game.

96.  A six-month pennant race.  Football has nothing like it.

97.  In football, nobody has ever said, "Let's play two."

98.  When a baseball player gets knocked out, he goes to the showers.  When a football player gets knocked out, he goes to get X-rays.

99.  Most of all, baseball is better than football because it's going on right now.