Two sports I really enjoy in general are football and baseball. I not only enjoy them for their visceral, unanalyzed experiential qualities that I, in common with your usual sports-fan, perceive; I am also interested in their characteristic analytical and/or aesthetic aspects of them. I will herein describe what I see in them—and although some pertinent comparisons will be drawn between the two sports, I don't mean the following to take the structure of a sort of tediously contrived "compare-and-contrast" exercise (although it still might, somewhat).
Football
The game of [American] Football, to me, is a fascinating collocation of surprisingly diverse elements. Its most obvious feature to many is that involved in its being a "contact sport," viz., all the "violence" and such, but I see that as really just a surface feature that is relatively incidental to its more fundamental aspects. I actually see a lot of aesthetically-manifested features in the game. For instance, to me a well-executed play is almost always a kind of work of art. Every football fan has seen a "beautiful pass," I think, and can thereby attest to this aspect of the game. The aesthetics of football are in interesting contrast and juxtaposition to its hard-hitting "contact" features: it is both like warfare and like ballet.
There are a number of complexities inherent to football, and I see this as manifested on different levels. There is the level of the "play," in which 22 people are each doing different things, and a kind of structure-in-chaos reigns. It is in this setting that meticulously planned coordinations can break down (just like in warfare) almost as quickly as they are brought into play, and not uncommonly some ability of improvisation is necessary to gain, or maintain, the upper hand. An experienced and talented football player has a "head" for the game wherein he can holistically "read" situations as they develop, in all their rapidity, and react appropriately. This is where, in football, perhaps the most excitement is generated. For truly, in any play, anything can happen, and players' ability to use this open-endedness, and make things happen, as well as reacting to events as they unfold, is what enables the game's most memorable moments to take place.
Then there is the "game" level of complexity, wherein the sum total of the efforts of both teams in a matchup forms a whole that constitutes the overall complexion of a game. There are all kinds of ways to win a football game: a team can win a game solely on the strength of its defense, offense, even special teams; or, the outcome may be determined by a more-complex interaction of any possible combination of strengths and weaknesses. The open-endedness of the manner of game play inherent in football's own structure and rules makes for this wide variety of kinds of outcomes.
Here's my take on what are the most crucial positions in the game:
Offensive line: I believe that the importance of these unsung guys in the trenches cannot be overestimated: if you can't protect the quarterback, or open lanes for a runningback, you don't have an offense and you can't move the ball. Period and paragraph.
Defensive line: The guys that can both put pressure on the quarterback as well as stuff the run are what make or break any defense. Linebackers can also come up to tackle runners and get sacks, but this "first line of defense" has got to be the most important. The defensive backfield can only really work against the pass.
Special teams: Don't forget about the "foot" in "football:" there's a reason it's there. Kicking is what establishes field position, and also decides close games, and a game can easily be won or lost on either or both of those factors.
Baseball
While football has aesthetic aspects that I appreciate, I enjoy baseball even though I actually see very little in it that's aesthetic. Even pitching, which requires finesse, seems to me to be essentially ugly and workmanlike. But in baseball's linearity lies a nested interdependence of factors that forms a weblike structure that's quite interesting in and of itself. I think of the sequence of play that constitutes the game of baseball as being a kind of "web of contingent dependencies." Where football has a higher-order "structure-in-chaos," baseball is linear enough that one can trace, in step-by-step fashion, exactly what the cause of each "play" outcome consisted in. It all begins with the pitch. When the pitch reaches the vicinity of the batter's box, the different possible outcomes begin to branch out from there. It's like those old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books people my age used to read when we were kids. The pitch may be hit, be swung at and missed, be fouled away, miss the "strike zone" and be a "ball," miss both hitter and catcher entirely and be a "wild pitch," or, in relatively rare cases, miss the catcher by no specific fault of the pitcher, in what is known as a "passed ball." Depending on which of those outcomes transpires, a whole other range of possibilities opens up: for example, a base hit can be a single, double, triple, home run, "fielder's choice" (in which case it technically won't be counted as a "base hit"); then beyond that a number of other possibilities in runners alternatively making it to the next base or being thrown out is dependent on where precisely the ball is hit.
The other interesting thing about baseball is that it consists of discrete atomic events, each of which constitutes a "statistic." This is part of its linearly-contingent structure: there's no clock ticking, but rather the game is played out in a sequence of individually-characterized events. Wild pitch, stolen base, runner thrown out at third, each is a discrete "stat," and there's nothing that happens in the course of the game that's not indivisibly part of some "stat." It's in this characteristic of baseball that I think the game strongly manifests a general feature of a sport that is part of the appeal of any sport: its systematic progression from the possible to the actual, by means of the game itself. That is why people watch sports: to see what happens. The non-sports-interested invariably don't care what the outcome of any given game is, and it is for that very reason that they're not interested. Conversely, a sports fan watches with interest the play of the game unfold, not just to be entertained moment-by-moment, but I think in large part because of the systematic potential-to-actual dynamic. The system of that dynamic is the game, with all its objectives and rules, and that's a fundamental reason, as I see it, why a game played in any particular sport is interesting to anyone. Baseball, with the myriad collection of "stats" that accumulate in the course of play, manifests this property in spades.
It's largely from the already-mentioned characteristics of the game that baseball derives its heavy dependence on pitching for game outcomes: as noted, that whole possible "web of contingency" is set into motion by the pitch itself, and the outgrowth of the course of any given baseball game ultimately depends on what happens the moment each pitch leaves the pitcher's hand: just like in Chaos Theory, it's a "sensitive-dependence-on-initial-conditions" type of dynamic. "Baseball is a game of inches," they say, and it is absolutely true. It is even a game of millimeters and of hundredths of a second: for that can be the difference between a home run and a fly-out, and all the runs scored or not scored that that may entail. Another reason that pitching is so overwhelmingly crucial to baseball is the clear fact that a starting pitcher faces every batter on the opposing team, at least twice, typically, while each individual batter may get only three or so at-bats per game. Unlike football, in which games can be won any number of ways, by strength of defense or offense or whatever, it is a tried and true maxim that pitching is baseball: solid, winning ball clubs invariably have high-performing pitching staffs. Given that clear fact, it is beyond my understanding why any one hitter should be paid something like $20 million per season. Any hitter, no matter how good, only comes up to bat a very few times during the course of any game, and it is dependent on a number of other factors unrelated to that batter whether he will have a chance to drive home any runs in any given at-bat. On the other hand, a pitcher who can strike out ten batters a game can obviously shut down exactly that many hitters, but no team offers pitchers anything like $100 million a season (yet)! Go figure...
In fact, consonant with pitching being so important to baseball, it would not be amiss to characterize baseball as essentially a "defensive" game. One way to put this is that a good baseball game is low-scoring (say, 3 to 2), while a high-scoring baseball game is "ugly." This is in interesting contrast to football, in which a low-scoring game is "ugly" (although a high-scoring football game may also be "ugly" if it just involves a lot of turnovers and miscues of that nature).
