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Sunday, March 19, 2023
Venezuela second baseman and Houston Astros All-Star Jose Altuve suffered a broken right thumb when he was hit by a pitch in a World Baseball Classic quarterfinal against Team USA, according to Venezuelan team officials.
Altuve was hit in the right hand by a Daniel Bard pitch during the fifth inning at Miami’s LoanDepot Park and replaced by pinch runner Luis Rengifo. While Rengifo scored one of Venezuela’s four runs in the go-ahead rally, Team USA came back to eliminate Venezuela 9-7 on Trea Turner’s grand slam.
Another high profile injury. Another fantastic WBC ballgame.
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1. The Duke Posted: March 19, 2023 at 08:54 AM (#6120709)But that's just not the way people's minds work. Expect a rising chorus of "the WBC is too risky" declamations.
1) Cancel all games where players can get hurt, including the WBC, pre-season, post-season and regular season games.
2) Don't even let them practice, cuz guys get hurt in practice, too. (Any man who so much as picks up a bat or a ball gets sentenced to 99 years, without a fair trial.)
3) Enclose all players in bubble wrap and keep them in a freeze-dried location somewhere in the Southwest.
4) Profit!
*Actually, isn't it always "this economy", just like it's always "times like these"...?
You ain't kidding.
Definitely not meaningless. Japan still has to beat Mexico, but we are one game away from realizing my dream scenario from the outset of these games: Trout and Ohtani both playing in a championship game. Probably the only time Angel fans will ever get to see that.
With the luck of the Angels, Ohtani will probably feel something snap in his elbow, in mid-pitch to Trout, altering the trajectory of the ball headed straight to Trout’s wrist.
Exactly my nightmare scenario, too.
TrAdition.
But the WBC matters way more for baseball fans in Cuba, the Dominican Republican, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan, Venezuela, etc than any NFL game matters to Europeans, because it is their national pastime.
Honestly, is there any doubt, in 2023, that baseball is more of a national passion in many of these countries than it is in America?
When I was 21 years old, I spent several months traveling around Europe (this was 1995), and my buddy and I spent a lot of time in Central Europe. This was only five or six years after the Berlin Wall fell, and in a lot of these countries, once you got out of the center of the country's biggest cities, it got pretty rugged, pretty quickly. The poverty ten miles outside of the center of Prague, or Budapest, or Krakow, was pretty stark.
Well, we make our way to former Yugoslavia, where the Balkan War was still going on in certain parts, but where Slovenia was (by then) safe. Ljubljana is the capital, and a gorgeous city - and in 1995, a couple of 21 year old American guys walking around stood out. It was a Saturday morning, and we got something to eat, and sat on a park bench looking towards an elementary school playground. It had a pair of basketball hoops, about 60 feet apart.
All of a sudden, a big group of teenagers come right up to us, and one of them spoke fluent English.
Them: "You American?"
Us: "Yeah, from sort of near Boston."
Them: "Celtics?"
Us:"Yeah, Boston like the Celtics!"
Them: "You play basketball?"
Us: "Yeah, sometimes."
Them: "Are you really good at basketball?"
Us: "I mean, we are OK."
Them: "You are American - you are very good at basketball, no?"
Us: "I don't know about very good, but...".
Them: "Shaquille O'Neal!"
Us: "No, we are not good like Shaquille O'Neal."
Them: "I bet you are excellent - you have sneakers on! You play with us!"
Then he speaks Slovenian to the other boys, except for "Shaquille O'Neal", and they get all riled up, picking teams, the two of us getting split up so as to "keep it fair".
For the next 20 minutes or so, we played full-court basketball with these kids, who were actually pretty good, and absolutely adored the sport. We had to go, but we thanked them for making us play - it was a lot of fun. I mean, playing basketball is fun, but the real awesomeness was sharing their joy for the sport.
When I see the passion and joy other countries express playing baseball or basketball, I realize that this is an opportunity for America to shine, and to bring people and cultures closer together. Crapping all over other countries' fans because they love baseball (or basketball, or football)? What's the point of crapping on other people's joy...especially over something your own country created? It'd be a little bit like making an awesome dessert for your dinner guests, and when they gush about how delicious it is, you tell them to bring it down a notch. WTF?
i think that is because us americans don't have an actual real team in anything. we are supposed to be "united" states but i think we are all a bunch of states that aren't really united about real too much. i disbelieve there is any national sport like some countries have, except crapping all over other countries' fans, that is.
but there has to be some kind of national identity for us because foreigners can always seem to spot americans of any ethnic persuasion (i mean after like the first generation) even if we haven't actually spoken to them
in mah not so umble opinyin, a whole lot of people who have the daily football game ON are doing it for the betting. nobody who watches/bets on football cares about the so-called "scandals" as long as the players just keep on smashing into each other anyway. so they use steroids. so they do drugs. so they rape people. so they shoot people. like, so what. people just like the violence
(p.s. - this year i did watch the pros play a game where they play flag football. the players, NOT wearing padded unis or helmets so that they look like human beings instead of stormtroopers, appeared to be having a blast. so i would guess that since there was no violence and the players looked like they having a good time, not real too many people watched/cared)
there is no american TEAM (i don't care what the dallasites say) like the non-americans soccer teams. i don't think i would say it is a national sport. certainly not like baseball used to be. prolly because it is now so expensive to play as kids that hardly anyone does it. and going to ML game is really expensive even if you don't eat or drink or buy anything there. even when i started blogging almost 20 years ago, when i could get $5 tix from a scalper outside, there was all KINDS of folks in the stands who obviously were not baseball FANS and didn't even watch the game and some of the ones who did had zero idea about any of the simple rules like 3 strikes = out
EDIT: And I say this as an American who does not have diabetes, but my birthday cake was adorned with chocolate fudge frosting and Marshmallow Peeps.
Actually, that is how you say it in Slovenian.
But the WBC matters way more for baseball fans in Cuba, the Dominican Republican, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan, Venezuela, etc than any NFL game matters to Europeans, because it is their national pastime.
In 2017 my only wish was that the Yankees would boycott the WBC, since they have enough injuries as it is.
Fast forward to 2023 and I've become a convert, even if I haven't been watching.
What I'd really like to see would be for the next MLB expansion to be in Mexico City and Santo Domingo (or San Juan). Yes, I know that those two cities may not have the requisite number of corporate skyrillionaires to fill all those luxury boxes, but if you priced the tickets to the local market I'd bet you'd be getting near capacity for every game, with the added benefit of bringing some life into the Marlins and Rays games when those two expansion teams visited Florida, or any city with a large Latin American population.
Obviously Tokyo would be ideal in terms of the wealth of its fan base, but the time zone gap would be impossible to get around. And Havana and Caracas are way too volatile politically.
Weren't you pretty aggressively anti-WBC in the past? That's quite the turnaround.
And you may, and others may not. And that’s ok.
Very much so, because of the injury factor. But at this point I think with the right sort of approach baseball can reach into Latin America in a Big Way with two expansion teams, as I mentioned above in #24. And though it's a much longer shot, it's possible that baseball interest could even spread into Europe. 30 or 40 years ago, how many European players were in the NBA?
I suspect it's a long-term project, and my brain isn't really coughing up a lot of information on how good the crowds were in the European qualifiers last fall. I do wonder if maybe in '27, there should be a pool in Europe (UK/Israel/Netherlands/Italy/Chechia?) so that it's played at a reasonable time there. It probably winds up as a too-easy path to the quarterfinals for the honkballers while the Asian one is much more competitive (Japan/Korea/Taiwan/Australia).
I also kind of think it should happen every odd-numbered year, both to keep it from seeming like a weird disruption and to keep interest in those less baseball-obsessed countries up. Just because the Olympics and World Cup happen on a four-year schedule doesn't mean the WBC has to.
That's true, but it's worth noting that all five European teams in this tournament qualified for the 2026 tournament based on their records this time - the teams relegated to playing in the qualifying rounds were two Asian, and two Latin American teams. I think that counts as a surprise.
I also stumbled across Rotterdam's honkball arena on an exploration of the city a few weeks ago ( Neptunus Rotterdam). I'm not sure that a North Sea port is the ideal climate, but the park itself looked nice - and there were several dozen players warming up in early March.
"Meaningless" ... it seems like there was a tipping point there somewhere that we all missed, at least in the US. To a great extent, "meaningless" or not depends on whether it matters to the players. Maybe the US players got inspired by the fervor of the foreign players.
I always find it an interesting concept -- why and how it comes to be "meaningful." For me (as an example), college baseball is 100% meaningless and I went to minor-league games pretty much just to hang out with friends and maybe pay actual attention to the game when the phenom came to bat but certainly had no interest in the score. At the ML level, I'm pretty "serious" about watching the game. But then there's college basketball which I always loved -- it didn't hurt that the first game I ever watched was Notre Dame's huge upset of UCLA, breaking their unbeaten streak.
I can still sorta remember, 25-30 years ago, Valparaiso made a run in the NCAA tourney. Their big win was a last-second shot. A big celebration by the team's top players -- the coach's son (a gym rat), a black kid from Chicago (a gym rat although he may have played on asphalt) and a big kid from Lithiuania. That's awesome -- three different cultures, never met until a year or two before but that game sure meant everything to them and I still remember it because they were so, so happy.
It's kind of a fluke of the tie-breaker rules - Pool A was all 2-2, so Taiwan has to requalify instead of Panama, the Netherlands, Cuba, and Italy (the last two of whom advanced with the same record); Columbia and Great Britain were both 1-3 in Pool C.
The geographically logical way to set things up next year is probably:
Pool A - Netherlands/Italy/UK/Czechia/qualifier, hosted in Italy
Pool B - Japan/Korea/Israel/Australia/qualifier, hosted in Tokyo or Seoul
Pool C - USA/Canada/Panama/Mexico/qualifier, hosted in USA
Pool D - Dominican/Puerto Rico/Venezuela/Cuba/qualifier, probably also hosted in USA
Figure Taiwan is almost certainly going to end up in B, although the hitch comes if Cuba doesn't want to be in the USA until later rounds. I also wonder if there'd be worries about small crowds for Pool A being bad optics.
They should have like a Trump team, a right thinkin' person team, and a Ron Paul glibertarian club. Vegetarians vs. meat eaters, too!
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