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1. Best Regards, Larry M. Posted: March 12, 2009 at 05:00 PM (#3101138)I think I would prefer a country that doesn't have the baseball exposure of US/Canada/Japan/DR/Venezuela to win the thing, in order to help grow interest in another country, if nothing else.
[1] That isn't to say that I want more players to enter the WBC. I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole thing at this point.
Youkilis (and Pedroia and Jeter) play for the US, therefore I will root against the US. I'll be in the stands in Miami Saturday night rooting for PR.
And good luck with the whole "Team USA" thing. Nobody cares about Team USA.
The f*ck you talkin' about, mister?
Yeah! Especially those United States citizens from Puerto Rico.
like the netherlands? =)
btw, baseball is also huge in korea. although probably still 2nd fiddle to soccer. while it doesn't have the mlb penetration/effect of japan let alone venezuela/dr, i'm not so sure i would include it in your list of "underdog/unexposed" countries like the netherlands, south africa, australia, italy and (mainland) china.
This is Boxing Think Factory, no?
Good thing he doesn't play soccer for the US national team.
According to the 2000 census, among the 1,291,737 Hispanics/Latinos living in Miami-Dade County, 50% were Cuban American, 11% South American, 9% Central American, 6% Puerto Rican, 3% Mexican American, 3% Dominican American, and 18% classified as Other. Within the county, 54% of the residents were foreign born.
this is pretty acruate. it's tough to make much noise when there simply aren't many of you.
i want the u.s. to win. if people are allowed to get as excited about swimming and gymnastics as they do, i don't feel silly rooting for my birth country, of which i am quite proud, in my favorite sport.
I'm caring about the WBC more than I thought I would, but what I'm caring about are the non-powerhouse teams because I find them interesting and watching their games gives me a chance to see Twins and Brewers minor leaguers.
OK, I tried researching this myself, but can't figure it out. Can someone please explain the BTF Matt Wieters inside joke?
Matt Weiters : fans of the pursuit of human excellence :: Pedroia : kevin
The games in the seeding round pretty much sucked, but nobody really seemed to be taking them too seriously.
Cuba vs. Japan in round 2 should be off the charts awesome
It's more like the Cole Hamels / Chuck Norris phenomena.
I was rooting hard last night, for team Venezuela. You really think you can take a K-Rod vs. Youkilis matchup and make me change my rooting just by dressing it up in nationalism?
Don't think so. I'm an Angels fan first (with loyalty to some great players even after they leave the big A).
It's not Carlos Ruiz's fault that Panama got knocked out! Look who has the starring role in their one highlight photo!
To Bill Brasky!
yeah, i'm thinking i may have to head down to Petco to see that (assuming Cuba takes care of business today)
Sunday at 1pm, that might be perfect.
Wieters was given the day off to attended the funeral of a friend back home. Immediately after the funderal, he hopped on the next plane back.
By the time he got to the ballpark, his team was losing late in the game, but they were threatening with the bases loaded. Wieters was inserted into the game as a pinch hitter and he hit a grand slam to give his team the lead.
In the bottom of the 9th, Wieters took the mound and retired the side in order for the save.
The fact that I both helped create the Wieters Meme and am the main WBC guy kills that argument. That said, the Oscars would have been 100000% better if it had Wieters.
As to the low turnout: Well, there was no advertising South of the Canadian border for Toronto Tickets. There was not a single poster, TV Ad or radio announcement in Buffalo, Rochester, Niagara Falls, etc- at least none I heard. I only got tickets to the US/Canada game because I'm an obsessive Baseball fan and therefore knew about the event.
Funny story however that has to deal with going over the border: My party literally had a 2 minute conversation with the Border Guard when he told us the Bills signed T.O.
Anyway...
I say again, there are only three things that will get a large majority of people heavily interested in the WBC:
1. A loss in the finals to Cuba.
2. A game that is so good, awesome and amazing involving Team USA that it makes the 6-5 game against Canada look like a game of catch....
3. Some heavily nationalistic reason. Like, if there was a major terrorist attack in January and the WBC would be the first International competition to take place after, then I'm sure a bunch of people would be interested. And you know Bud Selig would milk tragedy as much as he could.
Not so impressive, until you realize that "he" in this story refers to the friend. Oh, Matt Wieters, you've done it again.
I don't think so!
Good grief, Netherlands vs. DR I and II were some of the best games I've ever seen.
I don't think this would do much. Does anyone outside of southern Florida care about Cuba any more?
I'll be stunned, just stunned, if there is an MLB game this year that matches Netherlands/DR II for excitement and drama. The last post-season winner take all extra-inning game was Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS. Since then we've had two others that meet one of the two criteria; Game Seven of the 2006 NLCS went to the 9th inning and the play-in game between SD and Colorado in 2007.
We'd want to beat them just to make said people in Florida shut up.
I do.
I'm confused.
WBC <=> apps
???? <=> IPhone
All I can say is, ???? better not be Matt Wieters in this analogy, or there will be hell to pay.
They're essentially all-star games.
It's better than spring training, but not as good as a real game.
Players come out after 5 innings for no reason. Pitchers only go 50 pitches max....
They're played like exhibition games, so that's why fans have an exhibition-esque attitude towards them.
WBC = add-on app to good 'ol baseball sold to those people who don't like baseball for whatever reason but might if "USA! USA!" can be chanted
Worthless crap = IPhone
Matt Wieters = God Among Mere Mortals
Sorry for any unnecessary added thread length caused by my poor analogy (both above and here).
Heh. Spoken like somebody who's never tried one.
I love mine. Love it love it love it. Among other things, it's an incredibly efficient baseball-content-delivery system.
Well, it's nice to see real live competitive baseball again, but there just aren't any stakes, in the mind of many of us. Getting to this point:
I don't get why somebody born in the U.S. who has lived here their whole life would not root for Team USA. That is, if they watch the WBC.
I am pretty pro-USA, but I don't particularly care if the US wins this thing, or even wins a game. I'm not going to feel any pride if the USA does win, and as a result I won't feel any disappointment if they lose. I don't like some players on Team USA, and I do like players on some of the other teams. I don't know why I should suddenly start rooting for players I don't like for two weeks just because we were born in the same country. If someone wants to, that's fine, too. It's a sporting event, not World War III.
However, it's a baseball tournament, and only happens every 4 years.
They're played like exhibition games, so that's why fans have an exhibition-esque attitude towards them.
This is so wrong, it might be the wrongest thing I've ever seen. You've clearly not watched the WBC if you think the players treat them like an exhibition game. There is a 70 pitch rule in round 1, and that's about the only thing you can say is exhibition like. The only...ONLY...time I saw anything remotely resembling what you're talking about was in the seeding games, in which a lot of teams took starters out; but that's more like how managers play games in which they have clinched a playoff spot but are still competing for a division/home field: you want to win, but not at the expense of burning anyone out. The DR/NED, USA/Can, Japan/Korea, Cuba/Australia, PR/NED 1 were about as far from exhibition games as you can get. More like the 7th game of the World Series, for the most part. Look at the faces of the DR players after they got eliminated. Yadier Molina said his game winning hit against NED was better than his homer against the Mets.
Well, it's nice to see real live competitive baseball again, but there just aren't any stakes, in the mind of many of us.
I take my cues from the players on this one. If they buy into the stakes, then it comes across in the play. No, I'm not going to lose sleep like I would over a bad Yankees loss, but the games are still a ton of fun to watch.
I find it mildly entertaining, but I just don't see the point.
I'd rather watch a Spring Training game.
World Cup = WBC
I simply don't understand why anyone who cares in the slightest about baseball would not love an opportunity to see a small handful of the best players in the world for the first time.
It's in some minor way the opposite of the worst tragedy in the history of baseball--the historical destruction left in the wake of segregation.
Same things the Local Boys of the world said in the 1950s, 40s and before. (And yes, I know when Jackie Robinson started...)
I can't tell if you are being narrow minded or just wrong.
Yu Darvish (and friends) and the Cubans would beg to differ.
Note that I had never watched a WBC game until a few days ago -- totally skipped out on 2006 -- and I've been swept away by the games so far. I don't know how anyone could have watched the two DR/NL games and not climbed out of their own skin with excitement.
This is inexplicable and irrational, therefore I must conclude that you're exaggerating or being unserious.
What WBC fans don't seem to get is that many of us need a rooting interest in a game in order to care about it. And why should we have any real rooting interest in this? How many Americans really give a crap who wins these games? The allegiances I've seen proclaimed on this thread don't seem to go any deeper than the allegiances you'd give to a fantasy league team or a sleeper team in March Madness that you'd never heard of prior to some big upset they've just pulled. You build up an allegiance to a real team over the course of many years, but these so-called "teams" are all here today and gone tomorrow.
The best thing that I can see coming out of the WBC is if the Majors raided all the other teams and took their best players, paid them what they were worth and gave them more than a few weeks' worth of exposure. Either that or let the best regular team in Latin America play a postseason World Series against the Major League champion. That way it'd seem more like a real game than an exhibition contest.
I'll just say the quality of the WBC play and teams are way ahead of any spring training games. I like to watch a Dodgers spring training game as the next guy but its just not the same.
Talk about damning with faint praise... Everyone keeps raving about the DR/netherlands games, but what about the others? I tuned in to see what the big deal was. Saw a Mexico vs. S. Africa and a Canada vs. Italy game. I'm not going to watch any more. You may say that I didn't see the best games, but then I would say that you happened to. In the end, even if the games I saw were "great," I wouldn't care. They aren't real teams, there's no reason to root for any of them other than base, nationalistic ones.
Being the best baseball in the world doesn't mean some magic monopoly on all of the best players in the world. It's not as if Matsuzaka sucked one day and then magically got good when he signed his big ol contract.
The simple fact is that we watch the best baseball in the world, but do not get to watch all of the best players. Watching the WBC makes it a little closer.
As to why you should care, why do you care in the first place? By that logic, it's just dudes tossing a ball around.
MLB doesn't have to have every single one of the best players in the world to present the best quality of baseball in the world on a nightly basis over the summer. They may not have Darvish (yet), but they have Dice-K, and the best position player in the world of Japanese nationality in Ichiro.
That's part of why I don't care if team USA wins or not. I look at team Venezuela, or the Dominican, and I don't see furiners. I see players from the team I already root for.
I watched that Dominica - Netherlands game- it was fun to watch. But I had nothing invested in it, as I do when I watch Gordon Beckham against MLB pitchers.
I'll just say the quality of the WBC play and teams are way ahead of any spring training games. I like to watch a Dodgers spring training game as the next guy but its just not the same.
That may well be true, but that doesn't even begin to answer the question of why fans who need more than an ad hoc rooting interest in the outcome of a game should care about a game involving two here today, gone tomorrow teams.
And beyond that, you're also seeing them play in the same uniform that you're hoping that they'll be playing in for the rest of the year, or for many years.
I find it interesting to see a lot of great MLB players, along with a bunch of guys I haven't heard of, play highly competitive baseball.
You build up an allegiance to a real team over the course of many years
You're rooting for laundry.
I agree with you. I care because i have fun watching the games. If you want to go even further, why do you care for your team's games? It seems to me that MLB regular season games are as meaningless as WBC games in the grand scheme of things.
You give them the meaning. My country is not represented. But I still think this is a great opportunity to watch some good baseball and some players giving everything they have.
There. That's why I want the USA to win.
It's fun, but it doesn't really scratch any itch that I have.
But team USA has nothing to do with mom and apple pie and everything to do with beating those damn ferriners. That is, in a nut shell, why I don't care if they win or not.
As to why you should care, why do you care in the first place? By that logic, it's just dudes tossing a ball around.
Yeah, but it's my TEAM throwing that ball around. I have an interest in my team, the team I have been following for 26 years. These aren't teams, they are assemblages. Like I said, if you're mad about baseball in general, I can see the appeal, it just doesn't do anything for me. I need some sort of connection for it to matter to me. The WBC is indeed just dudes tossing a ball around for me.
Talk about damning with faint praise... Everyone keeps raving about the DR/netherlands games, but what about the others? I tuned in to see what the big deal was. Saw a Mexico vs. S. Africa and a Canada vs. Italy game. I'm not going to watch any more. You may say that I didn't see the best games, but then I would say that you happened to. In the end, even if the games I saw were "great," I wouldn't care. They aren't real teams, there's no reason to root for any of them other than base, nationalistic ones.
The first Canada vs. USA game, both Netherlands vs. DR games, China vs. Taiwai for sheer curiosity(I wanted to see if China improved on any level. That their best player was an American born Chinese named Ray Chang... well. I guess its a step. A huge win for the Chinese diaspora, but not so much for the domestic program.) I would watch either of the Korea vs. Japan's games but it was at 1:30 AM, I was either sleeping or studying my ass off for finals/research. Obviously, I didn't watch every game due to a number of factors, lack of interest, time, etc. But that would be the same thing during spring training, or the regular season. You don't have to watch every game and be a WBC fan, but there was more than just the two Netherlands/DC games.
The big problem with holding these games in March is that anybody on the quarter system is too stressed out from finals!
I almost never agree with Beano about anything, but this is totally OTM.
The idea that baseball can only be enjoyable if the people playing are wearing uniforms that represent one particular team is...insane. I mean, I'm trying to find a way to say that which is less inflammatory, but I really can't.
In order to care about X baseball team, you have to first like baseball. Otherwise, you'd form an irrational allegiance to some other random group of people. You'd go cheer for Wendy's employees or something.
It just seems like if you are keen enough on the game that you frequent a place like Baseball Primer, you might love to see the beauty in the game regardless of whether your personal team is playing.
That's not to say I expect everyone to get all gung-ho about the games. I get that just because you love the game, you don't necesarily stop to watch every game you see. Obviously. But this is a relatively unique event, once every four years, featuring a ton of bona fide major league stars, the best non-MLB players in the world, and a ton of awesome potentially ready-for-movie stories (the entire Dutch team, for example). It's pretty awesome, really. And even if you aren't going to fall in love with it, it's a bit weird to post consistently and repeatedly about how much you don't care about the WBC, insist that you'd prefer to watch Spring Training games, etc.
Ironically, it's an incredibly American attitude: I like what I like and [forget] the rest of the world. They want to impress me, show up in the American league. The best league in the world. Or, put another way: sure, sure, beauty of the game, whatever. How does this affect me personally? I say, it's far better to channel your nationalism into the sporting arena, where you cheer your country, feel pain when you lose, but be willing to recognize the talent that other countries might also have on offer.
And seriously, how hard is it to just pick the underdog in every game if you really need a rooting interest?
This is exactly the sort of thing I was referencing above. Total dismissal of a competition featuring other countries on the principle that "nationalism is bad." But of course that is a distinctly American attitude. The ability to declare baseball-nationalism bad stems almost entirely from the security felt by being able to exist right in the middle an American baseball hegemony.
You don't like the attitude that "foreigners are bad," then you should be encouraging the one format that puts baseball on display without assimilating all of these great players into the American norm.
Watch the games and cheer against the US. You'll be able to burnish your anti-nationalist credentials twice over.
It's fun, but it doesn't really scratch any itch that I have.
That's it exactly. It's all just a matter of personal preference. We all have our reasons for liking many things that others simply can't get into, for reasons both "rational" and "irrational." We should probably just all leave it at that.
The WBC is for baseball fans, not for Cubs fans.
Im not sure whether its 1. a sign of lack of interest, 2. an inherent flaw in the 'best available' seating system that Ticketmaster uses, 3. or dumb luck. If I had to venture a guess I think 25,000 would represent the high end figure for attendance.
I'm really surprised by the lack of attendance. It doesn't have the cachet, in my brain, of the MLB season, but the national pride that goes with the WBC gives it the potential to gain its own sizable following in the future.
I'm still not sure why there's (some) aversion to the WBC, though. As was mentioned above, it's about whether the players buy into it. And I think -- for the most part -- they have. I know there's a good amount of star-caliber players not participating but even so, it's still a loaded event, and the opportunities to see that much talent on the field at a given time is pretty rare. As such, I don't know how anyone who has watched these games honestly could say that these are nothing more than glorified All-Star games. If nothing else, the chance to see Cuba and Japan's best has more than sold me on the WBC.
*Oddly enough, I'm going to root like hell for USA in both the World Cup and in Olympic hockey in 2010. I'm not sure why that is... maybe because USA are underdogs (to varying degrees) in both hockey and soccer whereas in baseball there considered a favorite?
Edited to add: I'm not saying the pleasure I'm getting from watching the WBC is the same as the pleasure I get from a White Sox win. But I guess the pertinent question is, "Are you glad that there's a WBC?" And my answer would be a resounding yes.
There appears to be two different 'issues' -- the first is enjoying the WBC itself and the second in feeling some sort of 'obligation' (for lack of a better word) to root for the USA (or whatever country you live in). I can completely understand not rooting for your country's team. From my perspective it's not that I'm rooting against the U.S., it's just that (first and foremost) I want to see quality, exciting baseball. If that means the U.S. winning it all, yippee. If not, oh well -- I won't lose any sleep over that*.
I'm still not sure why there's (some) aversion to the WBC, though. As was mentioned above, it's about whether the players buy into it. And I think -- for the most part -- they have. I know there's a good amount of star-caliber players not participating but even so, it's still a loaded event, and the opportunities to see that much talent on the field at a given time is pretty rare. As such, I don't know how anyone who has watched these games honestly could say that these are nothing more than glorified All-Star games. If nothing else, the chance to see Cuba and Japan's best has more than sold me on the WBC.
*Oddly enough, I'm going to root like hell for USA in both the World Cup and in Olympic hockey in 2010. I'm not sure why that is... maybe because USA are underdogs (to varying degrees) in both hockey and soccer whereas in baseball there considered a favorite?
Edited to add: I'm not saying the pleasure I'm getting from watching the WBC is the same as the pleasure I get from a White Sox win. But I guess the pertinent question is, "Are you glad that there's a WBC?" And my answer would be a resounding yes."
Excellent post .
I just wish those guys weren't shackled to their home countries, so they could play with the other best players in the world.
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