Football and baseball overlap this time of year in October. It's the best time of the year for sports fans, you get to watch both sports, about 4-6 weeks in a row, and baseball and football are the two most popular team spectator sports, and as such, in this country, wouldn't you think they might tell us a bit about ourselves, tell us about our values, and maybe how those values have changed over the last 150 years. For that reason, I enjoy comparing baseball and football. Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game. Football is a 20th century technoligical struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park, the baseball park.
Football is played in a gridiron in a stadium sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium. Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall when everything is dying. In football, you wear a helmet. In baseball, you wear a cap.