Every so often, I see a list of 5 reasons why such-and-such thing is better, and 5 why a competing thing is -- often alternate versions of the same reason.
So, on this Super Bowl Sunday, while Super Bowl LV is in progress, I'm writing the top 5 reasons why the World Series is better than the Super Bowl, and the top 5 reasons why the Super Bowl is better than the World Series.
10. Super Bowl: Quick Fix. Okay, it's not instant gratification. An NFL game usually takes between 3 and 3 1/2 hours. And, with the Super Bowl, several things, including the halftime show, usually drag things out, pushing the game out to nearly 4 hours.
But it's done in 1 game. And 4 hours fits nicely into a single party.
9. World Series: Drawn-Out Drama. The story builds, and builds, especially if it goes the full 7 games. And if your team loses Game 1? You still got 6 chances to win 4 games. A bum one day can be a hero the next. (And vice versa.)
You lose the Super Bowl, this hangs over you and your team for 7 months. Or for all time, if it's a particularly bad moment. Face it: If the Buffalo Bills win Super Bowl LVI a year from now, people will still remember Scott Norwood. Hell, the Miami Dolphins won Super Bowl VII to complete what is still the NFL's only perfect season, and people still remember how Garo Yepremian almost "threw" it all away.
Also, if you don't like who sang the National Anthem before Game 1 of the World Series, you get another shot. If you don't like who sang the National Anthem before the Super Bowl, you're gonna be talking about that for about a month.
8. Super Bowl: Parties. Football is a communal event. A Super Bowl party is a communal event.
7. World Series: Intimacy. Baseball lends itself better to conversation and discussion. It's easier for couples, or parents and children, to bond over. It's more of a family thing.
6. Super Bowl: Commercials. Some of them are as legendary as the players.
5. World Series: You Don't Need Commercials. Come on: If the commercials are as memorable as the game, there's a problem with the game.
4. Super Bowl: No Red Sox. Guaranteed.
3. World Series: No Tom Brady. Guaranteed.
2. Super Bowl: It's America's Game. Men smacking into each other, and bragging about their achievements, while others watch them and eat like pigs and drink a lot of booze. What could be more American?
1. World Series: The National Pastime. Football is a sport where brains are necessary but brawn usually decides it. Baseball is a sport that places thinking above all. Ideas. And America was founded on ideas. That all people are created equal. That a person should be able to speak, write and worship as he or she sees fit. That we get to choose our leaders.
Football speaks to the bad things about America. As George Will -- a conservative columnist, but he's right about this -- put it, "Football combines the two worst features of modern American life: It is violence punctuated by committee meetings." And the injuries, to body and brain, remind us of how bad America's health care system is.
As James Earl Jones put it in Field of Dreams:
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: It's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good, and could be again.
James Earl Jones has been part of 3 films with baseball as part of the plot: Field of Dreams, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, and The Sandlot. (Okay, 4: He was the only member of The Sandlot's cast to return for The Sandlot 2, but The Sandlot is one of those movies whose fans like to presume that one or more sequels don't exist, or "aren't canon.")
He has never been in a football film. And, having just turned 90, he is unlikely to appear in one.
That ought to clinch it: The World Series is better than the Super Bowl. Baseball is better than football. Football and the Super Bowl are what we are. Baseball and the World Series are what we, sometimes, have been, and could be, if only we try.
Or, as George Carlin put it (I'm not listing the whole thing, just the parts that I think make the point for me:
Baseball is a 19th Century pastoral game. Football is a 20th Century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park! Football is played on 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...
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness. Baseball has the sacrifice...
Baseball has the seventh-inning stretch. Football has the two-minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit. We don't know when it's gonna end. We might have extra innings. Football is rigidly timed, and it will come to a conclusion, even if we have to go to sudden death.
In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling. Emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness. In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that, at least 27 times, you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being. Preferably, a stranger.
And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
In football, the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line!
In baseball, the object is to go home! And to be safe! "I hope I'll be safe at home! Safe at home! I'm going home!"
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