For about the first half of my life, I was a a baseball fan (New York Yankees since the mid 1980s). For the second half, I’ve been a football fan (Washington Redskins since the 1991 season). Usually, when someone learns about my taste for football, I’m confronted with a confused gaze and pressed to explain how I can follow such barbarity with such interest. An article about football as the American national pastime encourages me finally to summarize me these points:
- As the article quotes, “Baseball is what we want to be, football is what we are.” Having never seen Any Given Sunday, I’d never heard this before, but I think it paraphrases very well my belief that baseball is the ultimate individual sport and football is the ultimate team sport. Baseball is truly about individual talent, perseverance and statistics. A baseball game is so full of individual play that the plays requiring two or more members actually stand out, and “double plays” and “triple plays” are relatively rare (actually, a double play is often effected by one player, such as a second baseman, acting alone, and I could easily envision a shortstop pulling off a triple play singlehandedly). A football game, on the other hand, is so full of team play that the plays require, for me at least, every manner of camera angle, commentary, analysis and instant replays just to follow the action, because there’s so much going on at every moment. At least once during every game I watch, I need to stop action and watch a play from several different angles so I can figure out who did what.
- Also as Cobb argues in the article, “Football – because its strategy and discourse so often resemble warfare – tends to glorify militarism.” To me, the object of sport is to satisfy that urge in humans, the warfare urge, that is probably present in all of us, or at least most men. While baseball depends most of the time on what an individual player is capable of doing because of his inborn talent, acquired skills and unhealthy doses of … superstition … football is simply so strategic and so dependent on the coaches’ minds and plans, constantly changing and adapting, growing as strategists, quarterbacks analyzing tens or hundreds of options all the time with attackers swarming at them … let’s just say that football, in its abstractions, is far more real-world, while baseball, in it simplicity, is far more abstract.
- For the past decade there’s been a predictable pattern to every baseball season: it doesn’t matter how the Yankees do in April, but by July-August they will come together as a unit and slowly begin steamrolling their opponents. Without fail, they will still be playing in October. What explains their consistent post-season appearances? Money. Steinbrenner cares enough to invest in his team, so the team succeeds. But, “unlike many oligarchies, however, the NFL owners don’t hesitate to redistribute wealth amongst themselves. The architect of pro football as we now know it, commissioner Peter Rozelle, called the revenue-sharing scheme he designed ‘a perfect model for socialism.’” Revenue-sharing, free agency and the salary cap mean that from year to year and decade to decade, the football teams will have roughly equivalent physical talent and that, notably, the only important factor differentiating them is coaching. While I appreciate the MLB model – I like to cheer for a player and know that he played for the Yankees last year and will continue to wear pinstripes next year – the NFL model – even if it means a player will never start and end his career with the same team – sustains football.
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