Canada will be in Arizona

And USA winds up in the bracket that has three top-8 teams talent-wise. Oh well. And apparently the first round is a round robin rather than double elimination meaning there is a good chance that somebody in Arizona will go 2-1 and not advance.

And USA winds up in the bracket that has three top-8 teams talent-wise. Oh well. And apparently the first round is a round robin rather than double elimination meaning there is a good chance that somebody in Arizona will go 2-1 and not advance.

Yeah. It's like this, if the USA doesn't advance but is 2-1, you'll see them go back to double elimination in 2018. I feel as if the reasoning they have the round robin is so that they can better sell tickets. One of the problems with last time was that you didn't really know who was going to play in game X since it depended on who would win Game W or lost Game V.

Way I see it though is that Team USA SHOULD be able to go 3-0, even with the no-doubt-coming dropouts, but on any given day weird things can happen- that's baseball. After all, if all of the countries in the WBC were going to be in a 162-game schedule, the USA would have the best record, but it isn't, it's just a small tournament.

Tim Leiper (Third Base Coach)

If this is the same guy who coached third for them in Regensberg, he's quite a colourful cat. A friend and I bumped into him in town during the tournament and he was giving us the down-low on their strategy against the Czechs inbetween gelatos, (though they never ended up playing them).