When it comes to baseball vs. football, it’s like comparing rock and roll and country music. It’s possible to be a fan of both, but there’s no denying they are completely different.

This point was brilliantly driven home when George Carlin compared the two sports in one of his most famous standup routines.  Baseball, he noted, is played in a park. Football is played in a stadium – “often called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.”

He summed up the major difference best with this line: “Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game. Football is a 20th century technological struggle.”

There are many reasons baseball is better than the NFL, but this is a look at some of the key differences when it comes to comparing baseball vs. football.

Why Baseball is Better Than Football

Fairness

Football, especially in the modern era, is often decided on penalties. That means the referees, not the players, often control the fate of both teams. Also, football has unfairness baked in. One team can have the ball far longer than the other team, for example. And overtime rules can lead to end in sudden loss.

Baseball has 27 outs per team. Everyone gets the same amount of chances, with no time limit. You can’t get fairer than that.

Popularity

There’s no denying that football has become far more popular than baseball. A recent Gallup survey found that 37% of Americans named football as their favorite sport, while only 9% said that of baseball. They also listed basketball ahead of baseball with 11%.

How Does Baseball Rank in Popularity?

Other surveys have found the two numbers are closer, but none have baseball over football. The NFL has been the most popular sport since reaching television in the 1970s.

Attendance

When it comes to baseball vs. football in attendance, it’s not even close. Baseball, with a much longer season, draws far more fans to the ballpark. For example, total attendance for the 2019 Major League season was 68.5 million. In comparison, the much shorter football season drew about 17 million fans to stadiums around the league.

Competition

This topic has been discussed by people for decades. Football has a reputation for parity with a strict team budget, short schedule and a large playoff field. Baseball has no budget limits per team and a smaller number of teams make the playoffs. And yet, The Atlantic broke it all down a decade ago, saying football had a bigger problem than baseball in getting teams out of mediocrity (which has proved to be true the last decade in Detroit, Cincinnati, Miami, Washington DC, Oakland and, most famously, with the New York Jets).

At Harvard, they analyzed the data and found that MLB and the NFL actually have very similar parity.  One day, they may look back on this as the New England Patriot factor. The Patriots have won three of the last 10 Super Bowls and played in half of them. The last six World Series have been won by a different team, although the San Francisco Giants dominated the first part of the decade.

Those are some of the big differences when considering baseball vs. football. In our opinion, baseball is the better game. But don’t expect to say that and not get an argument from an NFL fan.

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