In Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” the sport mentioned twice is baseball.
The first reference is Joe DiMaggio, the famous New York Yankees center fielder, whose name appears in the song’s opening sequence of postwar references. Later, the lyric explicitly says “California baseball,” another reference to the sport amid names and events from the late 1960s and 1970s.
Released in 1989 on Joel’s album Storm Front, the song rapidly lists people, events, and cultural touchstones from 1949 through 1989. It is not a conventional narrative: the references are arranged for rhythm and association, then tied together by the repeated idea that each generation inherits a world already in turmoil.
Listeners sometimes count Joe DiMaggio only as a person rather than as a sports reference, which causes confusion. The question is asking about the subject represented by the reference, so both DiMaggio and the phrase “California baseball” make baseball the intended answer.