R.I.P. George Carlin...and recall his tribute to baseball

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.

Football is a twentieth-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.

In football you wear a helmet

In baseball you wear a cap.

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!"

Football is rigidly timed, and it will end "even if we have to go to sudden death."

In football, the object is for the quarterback, otherwise known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his recievers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the 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!"