Feh. Baseball is just cricket with half the rules stripped out. :) Same equipment level, lower ruleset = 'Merican.
Football ('Merican) has too much equipment to let a couple of iffy rules tip the balance in favor of it being a British style sport. Much more equipment, a few wtf rules = 'Merican.
A Dixie state just won the Stanley Cup. Nyeah. (And actually, while hockey has been tied traditionally to Canada as a national sport, you know as well as I do that the Northern US is as in love with it as Japan is with besuboru.) (Can I insert an impllied 'Northern' in the original statement instead? :D )
Actually, this is pretty much the reason, IMO, why soccer and baseball have such global appeal out of all the sports - you don't anything more than an open field and a ball for the former, or a stick, suitable fist sized object, and four flat objects in an open field for the latter. They're easily played by folks who can't afford equipment or facilities. Contrast this with helmets, pads, rink facilities (only a small band of climate zone can take advantage of suitable natural ice), pool facilities, etc, etc. While we used to play football as kids with nothing more than a ball and a yard, we knew that it wasn't really *football*, since the risk of injury was too high to actually ever work on critical skills for the sport without the proper equipment.
But after all that, the Brits insist on taking games based on simple equipment and making them complex through rules. They do loves their rules.
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Football ('Merican) has too much equipment to let a couple of iffy rules tip the balance in favor of it being a British style sport. Much more equipment, a few wtf rules = 'Merican.
A Dixie state just won the Stanley Cup. Nyeah. (And actually, while hockey has been tied traditionally to Canada as a national sport, you know as well as I do that the Northern US is as in love with it as Japan is with besuboru.) (Can I insert an impllied 'Northern' in the original statement instead? :D )
Actually, this is pretty much the reason, IMO, why soccer and baseball have such global appeal out of all the sports - you don't anything more than an open field and a ball for the former, or a stick, suitable fist sized object, and four flat objects in an open field for the latter. They're easily played by folks who can't afford equipment or facilities. Contrast this with helmets, pads, rink facilities (only a small band of climate zone can take advantage of suitable natural ice), pool facilities, etc, etc. While we used to play football as kids with nothing more than a ball and a yard, we knew that it wasn't really *football*, since the risk of injury was too high to actually ever work on critical skills for the sport without the proper equipment.
But after all that, the Brits insist on taking games based on simple equipment and making them complex through rules. They do loves their rules.