Baseball is not so much a punishing sport. You can play it for years and never get seriously hurt, never feel like the game is taking it out of you forever.
Football...HURTS.
I played exactly 17 downs of tackle football as an offensive lineman. It was not in any way a league setting...just a pick-up game of tackle football on the schoolyard as a middle-schooler. I did pretty well for nine downs because I was wide and pretty strong for a kid my age and I started my opponent on the D-line (he thought I would be easy pickings because I was fat...alas, I'm still fat).
On the tenth play, I got socked in the jaw..."by accident". On the eleventh play, I answered with a brutal takedown, thank you very much. Shoved him after he was down...I was mad.
On the eleventh play, he decided no more mister nice guy. My experience of that play was "Sky. Ground. Stars." The same on down number 12. Then down number 13. On the 14th down, I realized I was not going to be able to answer back now that he was good and mad, so I got real low and side blocked him, so he spun right past me and fell. On the 15th down, he caught me trying to do that and flipped me onto my back. And stepped on me. On down 16, I let him through and he collapsed the play instantly. On the 17th down, the center was about to snap the ball and I bolted from the field.
I tell this rather embarrassing story to make one point. Football sucks. It hurts you every single play. No one...NO ONE...can play that game and not want to be there for very long. The ones who don't want to be there are the ones who get hurt.