Ultimate Debate #4: Baseball is a Better Sport than Football

(INTRODUCTION) Thanks for accepting. I do hope this will be fun and enjoyable. Well, I might as well start. (ARGUMENTS) (1) Football is, by nature, a physical game. The point of the defence is to physically tackle/prevent the other team’s offense. That sounds all great, but imagine how many injuries come from this! I will present some facts from major league football leagues: “ A new study by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine links long-term brain damage to subconcussive hits in football, meaning hits that don't even cause concussions. This is by no means a revelatory finding, but it is interesting in its method, and its potential implications. The study examined 67 players during the 2011 season and found from blood tests that the 40 players who sustained the hardest hits had unusually high levels of an antibody that is connected to brain damage. When they scanned the brains of those players, they found damage that was predicted by the antibody: "This positive correlation could be an early indicator of a pathological process that, with time, could perturb players' brain health," says Nicola Marchi, a professor of molecular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, who co-authored the study with Lerner colleague Damir Janigro and Rochester's Jeffrey Bazarian. "All football players have repeated subconcussive hits-throughout the game, the season, and their careers," he says, but without external symptoms of injury, the hits were hard to measure. The blood tests appear to offer an early warning system." It seems like the real gains to be made here are at the amateur levels, where the training staffs and doctors don't possess the same level of expertise as those working for the NFL. Perhaps these blood tests can complement on-field concussion tests and other evaluations of brain trauma.” {1} So, brain trauma and other symptoms, including the concussions, of which 75% males {2} playing football will get concussions. That is ridiculous! But in baseball, that never happens, because it is a non-violent sport. Want to see just how violent football is? This is less of the head injuries but more of the other body limb injury: http://www.youtube.com... (2) Let’s say you a rabid fan of baseball, and you are a rabid fan of football. Wouldn’t it be better to be a fan of baseball because it is simply a longer game? I mean a whole 9 inninnings VS only 4 quarters of football. Look: “The NFL’s popularity is all the more remarkable when you inspect the fare it has to offer each week on television. An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.” {3} So only 11 minutes of play? Baseball is around 2 hours without commercials. Bam. That’s right. Two hours of what you love compared to 11 minutes. While it may not be such a good thing of a sport going on forever, it also sucks when you only get 11 MINUTES OF PLAY. I mean, You could get more fun from watching two monkeys wrestle. Plus it would probably last longer. There truly is no point in wasting 3 hours of your time for 11 minutes of action in 10 second bursts. Anyways, on to the next point! (3) “Recorded instances of baseball played outside North America came in 1874, when a party comprising members of the Boston and Philadelphia clubs toured England both playing cricket and demonstrating baseball. A further tour, by the Chicago club with the addition of various All-Stars in the winter of 1888–89, took the game to Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific islands. Returning via Europe and North Africa they played more demonstration games, including one in front of The Sphinx in Egypt.” {4} Baseball is a much more appealing sport to international people. In the International Federation of American Football there are a mere 68 members,{5} compared to the 124 International Baseball Federation members {6}. While yes, the two sports are generally associated with the US and Canada, Baseball is more appealing to a worldwide market because it is quite similar to other sports, like cricket and tennis. (CONCLUSION) In conclusion I believe I have proven my point for now. Thanks, DDD(REFERENCES) {1} http://www.sbnation.com... {2} http://www.concussiontreatment.com... {3} http://qz.com... (4) http://en.wikipedia.org... (5) http://en.wikipedia.org... (6) http://en.wikipedia.org...