For the past several days, the sports section of the Chron has been full of articles about a pending game between the Giants and the 49ers. This has engendered a certain amount of confusion.

Clarification for those of you who don’t do sportsball of any sort: San Francisco’s football team is the 49ers. San Francisco’s baseball team is the Giants. Some little town on the East Coast also has a football team named the Giants.

I have to wonder, though, who would come out on top in a game between the two San Francisco teams. The 49ers are rather woeful this season. Maybe they’d be better in a sport where the opponent isn’t allowed to leap on the guy with the ball. On the other hand, the SF Giants were rather woeful themselves. I’d suggest they try another sport as well, but given their injury-prone ways, offering them a free concussion with every play seems unnecessarily cruel.

(For the record, the NY Giants aren’t looking so hot either. But they did manage to be just a little bit better than the 49ers and improve their record to 2-7.)

Anyway, it’s fortunate for my ability to track events of national importance that there aren’t many of this sort of cross-sport name collision. The Cardinals play football in Arizona and baseball in St. Louis, which must make for some interesting scheduling in September and October. That’s about it for active conflicts, though.

Historically, the Washington Senators switched from baseball to hockey when they moved to Ottawa. A complete change of, well, everything, was probably a wise decision, given that it took them two decades to move, leaving D.C. in 1972 and not settling in Canada until 1992. Moving sucks, but that’s no reason to stretch out the process interminably*.

* Hint, hint, Oakland/Las Vegas Raiders.

There’s surprisingly little confusion between baseball’s Kansas City Royals and basketball’s Sacramento Kings. That may owe more to the latter team’s ongoing irrelevance–they haven’t made the playoffs since the 2005/06 season, haven’t made it past the first round since 2003/04, and haven’t won a championship since 1950/51.

The real winner in the confusion game, though, has to be the thinly-disguised triple-sport team. They play basketball in Atlanta as the “Hawks,” hockey as the “Blackhawks” in Chicago, and football in Seattle as the “Seahawks”. And yes, it does engender a little confusion when headline writers refer to the later two as the “‘Hawks”. It’s easy to overlook that leading apostrophe.