World Baseball Classic

Anybody but Cuba. I don't want to see a cigar smoking Fidel Castro led parade through downtown Havana with his(HIS) baseball team. Go Japan or Korea. Who won yesterday's semifinals?
 
Charlie said:
A better format than national all-star teams would be a Champions League as they have in soccer. The top finishing team(s) in each professional league would be in the tournament.

I wonder what the split was percentage-wise between Mexico fans and USA fans at the game in Anaheim? MEH-HEE-KO! MEH-HEE-KO!
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A Champions League format may be fine for serious baseball fans but I think the whole idea of WBC was to make it like the World Cups of soccer, cricket, and rugby - baseball is certainly as international as the latter two. You could tell that this tournament meant a lot to the fans and teams from outside the US. They seemed to be as into it as Europeans are into the World Cup.

I'm afraid Americans just don't get international sports. It's not a part of sports tradition to most Americans as US sports only became popular overseas long after domestic series were well established. To a non-American international tournaments in which your country plays are always more important than domestic events involving roving mercenary athletes. In the US there was no network coverage of the tournament and the games seemed to be hidden away on ESPN2. In the UK normal terrestrial (ie. network) TV is taken over by the World Cup of soccer with matches involving obscure African and small European nations getting the kinds of ratings the World Series would get in the US. Even during the rugby WC people who can't name a single player will pack the pubs to watch lots of matches.

To those of us born outside the US national rivalries are as important as the sport itself. It barely matters what the sport is when England plays Australia or France as it is going to be intense due to the historical ties and rivalries between the nations.

To the average American (most Canadians too, except when the national hockey team is playing) the outside world barely exists so such rivalries are meaningless. It's hard to imagine a more intense game than one between teams from Korea and Japan but I'll bet the already low ratings in the US were at basement level for that.
 
I always thought the WBC meant the World Boxing Council..........
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Edited by: white is right
 
How is Japan the worst team? Wouldn't that be South Africa, Mexico, the Netherlands..teams that didn't make it to the medal round. Unlike other nations in this tournament, The Japanese and American teams did not even form up and start playing until about three weeks before the tournament started. The Korean team started playing in January and the Latin American teams have winterball to get ready in their countries.
 
You know Japan has to be very proud of this team. Has Japan ever won a team event against international competition? I'm sure the've never won a world cup or the world championship in basketball , so maybe it's a first.
 
Wait a minute....Japan won?Japan can't possibly have won!They couldn't possibly have beaten Cuba!Japanese/Asian people aren't better athletes than blacks!They're not "as fast" or jump as high as blacks,therefore they can't beat blacks!So a team of them can't beat a team of blacks!This is obviously some kind of fluke!!
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Ihad no interest in this tournament, but what I think will happen in the wake of the U.S. team doing so poorly is provide an excuse for even more emphasis by MLB on developing hispanic and Asian players -- increasing the number of scouts based outside the U.S., building more "baseball academies" in Latin American countries and American inner cities while continuing to fail to do the same for white talent here at home. Despite (because of) the total dominance of whites at the college level, the minors are now majority hispanic; look for that to move closer to two-thirds in the days ahead as hispanics become the equivalent of blacks in the NFL. In short, the pace of the contrived "globalization" and "multiculturalism" of baseball within America will continue to quicken.
 
Weltner said:
Wait a minute....Japan won?Japan can't possibly have won!They couldn't possibly have beaten Cuba!Japanese/Asian people aren't better athletes than blacks!They're not "as fast" or jump as high as blacks,therefore they can't beat blacks!So a team of them can't beat a team of blacks!This is obviously some kind of fluke!!
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I always thought Cuba was a mixed society but judging by their baseball team Castro and his team must be full caste system supporters as the only whites on the team are the aging coaches.............
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KG242:
Actually Canadians have been playing baseball for as long as Americans have. We haven't produced many major leaguers because winter comes every year and then-you know- we stop for awhile. So we play part-time.
I'm sure you know where Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run? In T.O.. No, not that TO (the dopey suck), I'm talking about Toronto, Ontario. It was not a major league home run but it was a professional game.
Most Canadian ball players I've known look up to their American brothers. And did you check out that all white Canadian team coached by American Ernie Whitt?
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