No one needs to point out, much less enumerate, the ways in which baseball differs from football, even if that’s thanks mostly to George Carlin, the late great observational genius.
To wit:
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.
Football is concerned with downs — what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups — who's up?
So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that in this vacuous state when the two sports’ offseasons overlap, each took the diametrically opposite approach to a rules-related issue — and both sports are worse for it.