American football is probably pretty straightforward at a very basic level. (And very complex as you dig deeper--coverages, penalties though even the refs seemingly don't understand them a lot of the time, man in motion rules. A lot it's simplified because at any serious level, players do their thing and don't violate most a the less straightforward points that much. I think rugby is pretty similar.
As someone who reffed it at a very casual level, ice hockey seems simpler overall.
Baseball--I don't know but then I grew up with it. You pitch the ball, you hit the ball, you get the ball into play (or not), you run around the bases. Again, lots of subtle points. To actually answer your question, I assume so. But I don't have one myself.
I think you have to differentiate between professional (or collegiate) level football v. less formal games.
Having grown up playing lots of American Football all through school (for fun, not competitively), I think the rules are a lot more of a spectrum. For someone to play for fun or even watch the pros, most of the rules don't really affect the overall understanding. There will be some plays that get reversed or penalized on some weird technicality, but it's relatively rare. Things like "offsides", "false start", "delay of game", "intentional grounding", and personal fouls seem like the most common infractions, and those aren't really all that complex once you understand the basic mechanics of plays like the system of downs and line of scrimmage. "Illegal Formation" and various others get ridiculously technical and complex, but unless you watch a lot of football (and even then) it's not something that will have much impact and the refs/commentators nearly always explain what the infraction was.
Now that said, I don't mean to undersell the difficulty in learning the simple structure. Trying to teach my kids the rules when they've never played an informal game and were watching NCAA games with me was a helpful exercise at appreciating the weirdness. It's not the most intuitive for sure. If I hadn't grown up with it and had that informal experience as a baseline, I'd also struggle to make sense of the game just watching it without much explanation.
I'm a born American and I don't know the detailed rules to football. Baseball is conceptually easy though. Football seems super messed up with a clock that never seems to end and a game that is 90% commercial breaks.
> Football seems super messed up with a clock that never seems to end
I'm guessing you haven't watched much football then. I'm not saying that as an insult or anything, just a guess. There are plenty of weird things about the game, but the clock isn't one of them IMHO. The clock always runs while the ball is in play. It stops until the start of the next play when a player goes out of bounds or throws an incomplete pass, but continues running after a normal down. Each quarter is 15 minutes of play time, and it's quite strictly applied, and it is always displayed prominently, so it definitely ends. The length of a game is a lot more predictable/understandable than a game like baseball where time is disconnected from game length.
It is confusing because if the clock says 30 minutes left the game won't be over in 30 actual minutes.
The actual time left in a game mine as well be RNG for all the meaning the clock has.
Baseball doesn't have a clock and doesn't pretend to. The game is over under very clear circumstances, 3 outs per inning, top and bottom, 9 innings per game.
The weird part about football's clock is how the last two minutes sometimes take at long as the first 13 minutes of the quarter, so if you're only half paying attention to the game while hanging out with people it seems like the clock is going down at a steady pace and then it just stops going down.
This is because the final few minutes of a contended game are the most strategically complex, as the teams are fighting not just for scoring and control of the ball but also for control of the clock. Usually, the team that's behind is trying to slow down the clock (minimizing time-per-play and maximizing actions that require the clock to stop between plays), while the team that's ahead is trying to run out the clock to seal their win (unless their opponent is likely to score, in which case they may want to slow the clock so they have time to respond, etc). And since the stakes are so high, the teams spend a lot more huddle time to deliberate strategy, as well as going for more complicated or unusual plays that often require more careful review from the refs.
It's by far the most interesting part of the game, but if you're only passively watching and waiting for it to be over, it can feel agonizingly slow.
As someone who reffed it at a very casual level, ice hockey seems simpler overall.
Baseball--I don't know but then I grew up with it. You pitch the ball, you hit the ball, you get the ball into play (or not), you run around the bases. Again, lots of subtle points. To actually answer your question, I assume so. But I don't have one myself.