Despite the title of “our national pastime”, baseball is not the most popular sport in America. By far, football is the most watched sport in America, earning top dollars and millions of fans worldwide. However, should football really obtain all of this attention?

Many people watch football for fast paced games with tons of excitement. Often the people who love football for this reason despise baseball for being slow and boring. However, in baseball there are no breaks throughout the game, nine consecutive innings with no interruption. Also, during the Arizona Fall League, a conference for minor league prospects, Major League Baseball (MLB) has instituted a rule, allowing pitchers at most twenty seconds between pitches, and in doing so, studying the affect of this rule on the pace of the game. Football, however, is paused numerous times within the game, including halftime and between quarters. So really, the sport that needs to be more continuous is football.

Many fans also believe that baseball involves no athleticism and that football is a test to a man’s tenacity. However, baseball requires swift reflexes, hand eye coordination, timing, and, of course, physicality to beat out an infield hit or catch a fly ball one hundred feet away. Also, many football players such as kickers are not being physically taxed that much since all they have to do is kick a football sporadically during the game and often are hardly in shape.

Likewise, a baseball season is one hundred sixty two games, spanning from April to November if a team were to make the playoffs, spanning six months for non-playoff teams. This involves an extreme amount of stamina that many other sports do not. Meanwhile, football only lasts from September to January if one makes the playoffs, only four months for non contending teams, and there is only one game a week for each team. Football players also get a bye week, or a week off. The only time baseball players get off is when they are injured or during the all-star break.

Another opposition to baseball is that the players make too much money. However, the players are allowed to make this kind of money because they have a players union, a group of current and former players that works out deals with MLB and allows each side to share their grievances and make plans that support each other. If the players union in the National Football League (NFL) fought for larger salaries, they would probably be able to get them. One does not get that kind of diplomacy playing football.

Additionally, there are many more aggressive individual football players than baseball players. Over the past month, several football players – Adrian Peterson and Ray Rice to name a few – have beaten those close to them. According to Bob Costas, a prestigious reporter, an average NFL player is more than twice as likely as the average man to face a weapons charge. One never hears about baseball players sheltering weapons. 
Furthermore, as stated by former Bears GM Jerry Angelo to USA today, “hundreds and hundreds” of crimes are denied by the NFL everyday. GMs tolerate these crimes to happen in order to win games and have a successful year.

Although in baseball there still is the looming shadow of the steroid era, MLB has worked hard as a whole to establish harsh punishments against those players who have taken steroids. While there is no proof that football players have ever taken steroids, it’s hard to believe that some of these players got so buff and strong by just working out.

While many American people have jumped on the NFL bandwagon, it is clear that maybe they should not have jumped on so quickly. Baseball players have to play longer seasons and there are fewer interruptions during the game than in football. Baseball does involve athleticism, even though several positions in football require very little athletic ability. Also, the baseball players union fought to avoid a salary cap, while the union in football does not have the power prevent one. There are more dangerous criminals in the NFL and definitely greater arrests of NFL players than MLB players. Thus, baseball still is, and, will always be, America’s national pastime.