Baseball! I used to play baseball. In fact, I was on the Irish Little League team and competed internationally including one tour in America. Even played a game in Cooperstown. Lovely part of the country... But in fairness, no, I wouldn't call baseball 'pitch and bat' on account of its method and apparatus, rather I differenciate the descriptive force of the term 'football' as it applies to
the most popular sport in the world, and 'football' in the case of North American Football, in which the athletes spend some of the game
on their feet.
And please don't give recourse to the physical danger of American Football in the attempt to justify all those accessories. Take Gaelic Football for instance, which might be considered across the way there as baseball and American Football combined: fastest team field sport in the world, played by muck savages wielding hefty hurls made from ash wood, each peregrine pass of the sliotar - let alone each
legitimate tackle - a potentially fatal or career-ending event... you'd think they'd be in favour of trading some speed and grace of motion for proper padding, but no! What have they got? The OPTION to wear what is in essence a toy helmet, an option that most of the players refuse anyway. It is a contact sport; some of the challenges in the more heated contests would warrant police intervention in any other sport. Not in Gaelic. The level of athleticism is so high that even the toughest tackle is made without any intent to injure the opposing player and subsequently very few players sustain bad injuries.
But for the most part, Gaelic players are plug-ugly and SHOULD be hidden from plain sight under a big helmet. Preferably with the sponsor's logo emblazoned across every available square inch of surface area.
Come to think of it though, in many parts of Ireland you'll hear football referred to, but the speaker means the game of Gaelic Football. I see no problem with that, so why then do I take such umbridge at what I perceive to be the bastardisation of the Beautiful Game's moniker? I certainly wouldn't go around calling football 'soccer' or 'association football' but, tipping my hat to Voltaire here, what difference does it make, at the end of the day, what you call a particular sport as long as it elicits in you all of the passion and enjoyment that it would do
under any name?
Football is just one more of those cultural tropes, rent in twain by the Atlantic, that draws into focus some of the more fundamental differences between Europe
per se and the United States. In an oft-quoth and gnomic sentence that sums up the predicament, we are "two nations separated by a common language" (attributable to many different sources but while I'm feeling jingoistic I'll give it to Shaw). The words may be sometimes synonymous but their referents [sic] are wholly apart.
Mneh, I've gone full-circle on this now so, I guess, you guys can enjoy the football and beer, and we'll enjoy the football and beer too!
HOWEVER... just to keep this good old debate alive, here's something I found after a quick Google search of "difference between Europe and USA":
same difference.
