I love baseball and think football is boring but a lot of Boswell’s list is just stupid, and in fact doesn’t name any of the things that make me like baseball more.
Come on. You aren’t even trying.
The Harris County Domed Stadium was built in 1965 specifically for the Houston Colt .45s, an expansion team granted solely because the owner promised to build said stadium in 1962. Both the stadium and the team were renamed for opening day in 1965, the Astrodome and Astros respectively. Initially it was grass inside, replaced with Chemgrass in 1966. Chemgrass was renamed AstroTurf immediately after due to publicity. The turf, the stadium and the team were all effectively named at the same time by the baseball teams owner. The Houston Oilers didn’t even exist until 1968.
Nope, not really. Beyond checking the wiki for 15 seconds, and checking out the AstroTurf site for another 15, nope.
Thanks for doing the in-depth research, though!
Joe
That list certainly didn’t age well. I imagine it was a pretty stupid list back when it was written, but now that we’ve seen how the last 25 years have unfolded it’s almost embarassingly stupid now.
I have every confidence that dopers could put together a much more compelling list demonstrating the superiority of either sport. Or any sport, for that matter.
The more whimsical entries, such as “Baseball means Spring’s Here. Football means Winter’s Coming.” and “In football, nobody says, ‘Let’s play two!’” were kind of fun, but the complaints about penalties and stats and the two-minute warning and so forth just sound like a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Kickers think they “kick a touchdown”?? Whuh?
I happen to prefer baseball myself, but most of this list was just stupid.
You can’t blame Boswell for not having ESP. But the list is just dumb even by the standards of the time.
And frankly, I was saying long before the roid scandal broke that a roid scandal was inevitable. Lots of people were. I’ve said it before and will again; the point at which every sporting league on earth should have cracked down on PEDs was the 1988 Summer Olympics. If the Ben Johnson scandal didn’t show you what PEDs could do to the reputation of a sporting program, you had to be as blind as Stevie Wonder.
And complaining about nicknames? Jeezus.
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The more whimsical entries, such as “Baseball means Spring’s Here. Football means Winter’s Coming.” and “In football, nobody says, ‘Let’s play two!’” were kind of fun, but the complaints about penalties and stats and the two-minute warning and so forth just sound like a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Kickers think they “kick a touchdown”?? Whuh?
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Boswell is referring to the practice NFL teams had of getting European soccer players to be their kickers, so you had a league where an extremely critical part of the sport was a skill unrelated to any of the rest of the sport executed by players who really didn’t know anything about football. The most famous example was Jan Stenerud, who’s in the football Hall of Fame and IIRC was the first pure kicker ever elected.
However, I don’t believe this is common anymore, as now U.S. college kickers kick like soccer players and so the advantage of importing soccer players is gone.
Really? So what team was I watching play in 1961? The ones with the little oil derrick on their helmet.
The Oilers predated the Colt 45s by a year and a half.
That baseball is better than football is a truism. It doesn’t need defense, any more than gravity does.
The specific “kick a touchdown” quote goes back to that era, and was apparently made by Garo Yepremian. The story goes that Yepremian kicked an extra point late in a game (which his team at the time, the Lions, were losing), and began to celebrate. When Alex Karras asked him why he was celebrating, Yepremian is said to have replied, “I keek a touchdown.” (In George Plimpton’s book, “Mad Ducks and Bears”, Karras, who really didn’t like Yepremian, teased the kicker about that.)
At any rate, by the early 1980s, most NFL teams were employing soccer-style kickers who were born in the U.S., so Boswell’s comment was out-of-date even then.
(And, yes, Stenerud was the first pure kicker elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a distinction which he still holds, though many believe that Adam Vinatieri has a chance to make it in.)
Indeed; the Houston Oilers were one of the AFL’s founding franchises in 1960.
With baseball, you can play a game of ninepins, have a drink, grow a long beard, lose your dog and wife, and still “not miss a thing”.
I imagine Stenerud will continue to hold that distinction if Vinatieri is elected.
I’m sure there will be more, but here’s the one that sticks out in my mind:
Reasons Why Football Is Better Than Baseball
#1 - One of the most exciting events in baseball, the event so awesome it makes fans wet themselves in anticipation, is the “perfect game.” A “perfect game” is a game in which one team never even threatens to score. Talk about excitement!
I hadn’t heard that story before, so I’ll give Boswell that. Still, he wrote: “Half of them, in Alex Karras’ words, run off the field chirping, ‘I kick a touchdown.’” Bit of an exaggeration, no?
Gah, I misworded what I’d intended to post. Stenerud was the first pure kicker elected, and he is still the only one to be elected (which is the distinction that Vinatieri might end).
Counter-argument:
“In arguably the greatest football game ever played, in 1946 Notre Dame tied Army 0-0.”
By 1987, when Boswell wrote it, it certainly was (heck, the quote was 20 years old even then).
And the Wall Street Journal did it more methodically:
Baseball has more live action than football.
We have an ongoing and sometimes lively discussion around our office on the subject “Which is the greatest game: baseball or football?”. But in this case, the ‘football’ in question is what we in America usually refer to as ‘soccer’. On the one side of the discussion you have the native-born USAites, and on the other several folks who are relatively recent arrivals from ‘across the pond’.
The only thing that we’ve been able to agree upon so far is that the one sport is intensely gripping, steeped in strategy and nuance, and full of nail-biting excitement from start to finish, regardless of the score, while the other sport is a snooze-fest from beginning to end.
Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, i guess 
That kind of comparison is just silly. Far more happens per second of action in football than baseball. Orders of magnitude more.