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Monday, March 24, 2008
MLB: Bauman: Strong Team USA would help World Baseball Classic II
But the next time around, something more is going to be required from the American team if this event is to be taken to an even higher level. The U.S. will play in the Toronto first round at Rogers Centre, in a pool with Canada, Venezuela and Italy. There will be three teams with a legitimate chance to advance, and only two will, so the American team will not be able to ease its way into the tournament.
There should be no shortage of top-shelf American players who are eager to play for their country, particularly in light of what happened in the first tournament. If it is disrupting to Spring Training routines, this is a small price to pay for the honor and the privilege of representing the United States of America.
In the first World Baseball Classic, the internationalization of baseball was vividly on display, with individual talent and collective effort put forth by teams from all over Planet Earth. If the second World Baseball Classic is going to take the level of global competition even higher, the team from baseball’s first home is going to have to play better.
Or the world will crumble like the corner of a Thomas’ mini-square bagelbread slice and we’ll all end up with our head between our legs...just like Burgess Megadeth’s eternally crushed Henry Bemis! Heaven help us!
Repoz
Posted: March 24, 2008 at 07:57 AM | 70 comment(s)
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Speaking as a Canadian the last WBC was pretty damn awesome.
A dominant US team is about the last thing I want to see, although I admit, I could be biased
Besides, his name is a little too exotic . . . .
I don't understand why anyone wouldn't enjoy this.
Yeah, Markakis >>> Francouer. He's a stud.
Well, the quality of World Cup soccer is far below that of the best professional leagues, so I think that's par for the course.
Watching this lineup should be enjoyable no matter what the context is. If you love baseball, why wouldn't you want to see these guys play on the same field? If it was held near your home, wouldn't you have to buy a ticket?
Every hardcore baseball fan I met, spoke to, loved the WBC. The people that sniped at it were those same people in the media that poo-poo all things baseball.
Seriously, don't watch it if you don't like it. It is not like this event was promoted endlessly and running on a loop 24-hrs per day like MTV Rock n' Jock.
Several reasons -
(1) I really don't care what country a player is from.
(2) They already have most of the best players in the world playing on the same field - it's called Major League Baseball.
(3) I can't get behind a "temporary" teams, pieced together for one tournament, and then disbanded. It's fake. No, I don't like Olympic team sports, either.
I won't. I will just get really angry if a player I care about gets hurt playing in it.
Did you actually watch the first one?
Well, they don't have most of the best Japanese and Cuban players in MLB, by a long shot. Nobody knows definitively how good those players are against major-league competition. And not so coincidentally, the two finalists in the last WBC were ... ?
Edited for clarity
Also, it was fun to see how good the Koreans, the Italians, the Dutch, the Australians and the South Africans were. In fact, for me, the American team was the least interesting part of the tourney by the end.
They could play it in my yard and I'd close the blinds.
There's a reason they spend March playing fake games -- they aren't yet prepared for real ones. Putting a big 'V' on Johan Santana's hat and telling me his command-free 30-pitch stint on March 3 is special doesn't make it so.
Insanity! You don't watch Spring Training games?
You know why spring training baseball sucks? Because the teams aren't trying to win. The teams in the WBC were trying to win. That means more meaningful baseball to me, and I love the prospect of extra meaningful baseball.
Jeez, if you take that approach, putting a "T" on John Rheinecker's hat and a "KC" on Leo Nuñez's and having them go at it in Texas in the middle of August leaves something to be desired, too :)
Do you really like baseball?
If Damian Easley and Brett Tomko were playing wiffleball in my backyard I would watch every second of it.
I can agree that I don't really care much for the Olympic sports where there already is a popular sports league. But I like the track and field events and a few of the other sports I don't get to see in sports leagues. Thus I'm actually pleased baseball is getting removed from the Olympics.
However, the nature of baseball outside of the US and in Latin America and Asia is very unique. The WBC shows this passion. The best thing that came out of the WBC was that a lot of assumptions of baseball, at least from the American perspective, were challenged and some destroyed. The results of the first WBC were surprising.
In soccer, it's not just a matter of collecting good players. They need to have time to train together and play together. The biggest issue facing national teams is often getting the players together for a long enough period to allow them to be able to actually play properly according to the trainer's plan.
Not really. It showed that some countries (and some players) cared a lot more about the thing than others did. It also showed that, unless there's a huge disparity in talent (and nobody was claiming that there's a huge disparity in talent between the best American and the best Japanese or the best Cuban players), anything can happen in one game.
Neither is a revelation in any sense of the term.
At least in that instance, "get off my lawn!" would make sense.
Now, your behavior just makes you a whiny #####.
Not to you it's not. There were a lot of people I know who were shocked that the Americans lost. Didn't the US team lose to a team that should have been a total walkover? That was a big surprise. I was shocked.
Anyway, I watched every game I could last time around and will do so the next time around as well.
Also, Byung-Hyun Kim gave up a big HR late in a game against the Japanese. If he chokes, you know the games had to mean something.
I don't like how one game has such a big difference in the preliminary rounds. I know that's what they have to do for the sake of the schedule, but baseball lends itself to a "one game playoff scenario" worse than any other sport IMO. I could be misremembering, but wasn't it one bad game against Canada that pretty much doomed the US from playing for anything?
They lost to the Korean team.
It's special if he thinks it is. As stated above, nobody cares whether they win a game or not in spring training. Not so in the WBC. If they didn't care, they wouldn't participate. The trick is to get enough of the highest-level players to care.
I agree that the single-elimination aspect is annoying. That's a bad enough setup for a basketball tournament, but at least they score enough points per game that if a team loses to a team they should beat, it was probably a close game and nearly a tie. Not so in baseabll.
And Canada! I loved watching the Korean and Japanese teams play in 06.
No, the loss to Canada was in the the first round pool, which the US made it out of. It was the 2-1 loss to Mexico in round two, after the US had lost to Korea, that doomed them.
They did beat the Japanese team, though.
The results of that tournament were more or less a series of coin flips between the top half-dozen teams or so.
Kind of like how the NFL decides its championship from year to year.
Coin flips or nine inning baseball games, either way. I prefer a tournament that everyone (except South Africa) can win, even if they are the inferior team.
You might want to pause from trying to rationalize your curmodgeonliness and think back to every time you've heard that the MLB playoffs are a "crapshoot."
Only more so - individual baseball games are far less predictable than individual football games are.
The MLB playoffs are a crapshoot. I hate the current playoff structure.
I hate short-format tournaments.
Bud should have been making overtures to Raul, upon the latter's ascension, er, election. No reason we can't get those guys in the bigs.
Boston and Cleveland share the championship title! Arizona takes the NL! 2006 World Champion Yankees!!!
I hate the 5 game series deals but there's no way you're going to be able to structure something that wouldn't take 3 months that's going to crown the definitive best champion. Playoffs are hardly even designed to do that as is, it's about creating entertainment.
Teams do have to qualify to get into the World Cup so it's not like these guys have never played before. Not only that, but I believe they have up to a month of training before playing the first round. Granted its not as much time as club teams get to train together, but it's something. The level of play could certainly be better, but saying its "far below" the level of the best leagues is false. Sure, the big four in England look good playing against all the other awful teams in the Premier, but put them against Brazil or Germany, and they'd lose a lot more than they'd win. Ditto for Madrid and Barca in Spain, or the big teams in Serie A.
Yes we already have a league where the best players compete, but we have to remember that most Americans have a dog in that in fight (they root for a team with local or personal connections). For the millions of baseball fans around the world who don't have one, the WBC gives them one.
It's an emotional argument, but I think in this instance an emotional argument is a valid one.
The difficulty arises in making the tournament meaningful, and for a bit it's just going to have to be midwifed through its early growing pains.
I can live with (but still not like) a short-format tourney as a coda onto a regular season (my biggest beef is still with the Wild Card; if they got rid of that, I'd be happier). I don't accept it as the final word on team quality, but it's okay as a sort of victory lap for the best teams.
But the WBC has nothing for me - the teams are artificially put together in a way that holds no appeal to me (again, I don't care about the nationality of the players), there's no continuity between one team and the next, and I don't care about any one team enough to root for it. And the results are pretty much meaningless.
I end up just rooting that nobody gets hurt. Whee.
I don't think that will be happening.
Like the Pro Bowl!
I think one of the arguments against this was that potential free agents would be reluctant to play due to the possibility of injury.
If the question is: when would competitive exhibition games cause the least issues? After the World Series would be nice, except November is baseball weather in a lot less regions than March.
There's a lot in the way to make this ideal.
Re: RF. Its interesting how Markakis has overtaken Hermida and Francoeur as the premier RF. even more interesting, 3 georgia high schoolers within a year of each other all making it big in the majors at the same position.
Actually, I was referring to individual seasons in the NFL. Other than the perpetual pathetic Bengals and Cardinals, each 4-12 team or Super Bowl runner up has nearly equal chance to finish 14-2 or 2-14 the following year.
Consider me in the parity is vastly overrated camp.
Kind of like how the NFL has the Pro Bowl in Hawaii, but can't get a single player to show up. Thus they are moving it back to the lower 48.
I like watching great baseball players play, and I like watching athletes playing sports with passion. The WBC surpassed my expectations the first time around, and I'm hopeful some kinks are worked out and it continues to grow.
Focusing on the negatives is just being, well, negative.
I definitely watched the WBC and liked it, even though I considered it a lesser cousin to "real" MLB games. But it was better than spring games. I really liked watching Cuba; if the passing of the torch from Castro ends our misguided foreign policy there, I could see a ML team there in the next 20 years.
My main issues were that it really wasn't the best talent available, and that's part of why the US lost. Randy Winn, Al Leiter, Brian Schneider, and Mike Timlin were on the team; guys like Barry Bonds, Brandon Webb, Joe Mauer, and Billy Wagner weren't. I also would be pretty annoyed if there was a serious injury to a player on my team, knowing that they play harder than they would in spring.
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