Baseball On My Brain

The old-timey, romancing-the-past side of me got intrigued by this article that happened to be on the front page (?!?) of the January 1, 2009 edition of the New York Times.

As George Carlin reminds us, there are numerous differences between baseball and football, particularly that football is a twentieth-century technological struggle, while baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Well inspite of all that technology, there is the good ol’ football chain gang.

To think about how much football revolves around the first down – effectively the lifeline of the offense – and then to realize the antiquity of the procedure that goes into spotting and measuring the position of the ball, it’s kind of suprising. I had never stopped to think about it – this isn’t FootballOnMyBrain.com, now is it? But now that I have, I have a bit more affection for this classic device which I believe is best referred to as “the chains.”