RealClearSports.com compiles 10 reasons why baseball’s spring training beats football’s training camp.

Downtime
Normally, there is no down time during an NFL training camp, unless you count sitting in a large tub full of ice. Players are usually so exhausted that any and all free time they have is spent either eating or sleeping.

Baseball just simply isn’t as demanding as that, which allows them to work on some of the game’s finer points, like perfecting the “hot-foot,” determining exactly when to shove a towel full of shaving cream into a teammate’s face during a live TV interview, and everyone’s favorite, learning exactly how to place a bubble-gum bubble on your pitcher’s head.

Pressure
Imagine if an NFL wide receiver went all of camp without catching pass in any of the scrimmages or games. For a month in game-competition, every pass that came his way either sailed through his hands or bounced off his chest. To top it off, he was often running the wrong routes and missing blocks. The chances of him making it past cuts and onto the final 53-man roster would be slim to none.

Translate that to baseball, where the opening day starting lineups are usually already set before February even begins. A player could have an awful spring: terrible at-bats, poor fielding and too many strikeouts, but come April, he’s in the starting lineup (just ask Ichiro, who struggled last spring and started 0-for-21).

Practices
Seemingly as soon as a football practice begins, players are in full pads, flying around and running into each at full speed. This continues for hours at a time, in extreme summer heat, and often, twice-a-day.

Baseball practices, on the other hand, feature fielding fungos on perfectly manicured fields, hitting balls of a tee, first base running drills (seriously), covering first base on sacrifice bunt roughly 3000 times and doing whatever it is those Red Sox are doing in that picture – it seems highly likely that one could go through an entire practice without breaking a sweat.

Not RealClearSports.com’s best work. The three reasons listed above are supposed to be in favor of spring training, but I’d say every one of them favors training camp.