Lets talk World Baseball Classic

So lets get right into this, I'm sorry for the delay (1 month at least) but I'm going to retry to get on top of this blog. I want to talk about the World Baseball Classic. It is a great event I think, but what does it really mean on a grand scale of things? What does a World "Cup" essentially of Baseball mean for Baseball around the world?

Lets look at first the Soccer World Cup...what do we notice? Well first off qualification for the World Cup takes nearly 4 years, as soon as one is over you start qualifying for the next WC. So here is the great thing, basically every nation is in the soccer world cup, it just goes through rounds of qualification/elimination for three years until you reach the actual World Cup tournament hosted in a single nation.

When the teams (and fans) get together it is a great show of culture and many get to see a very large array of styles. Lets be honest, soccer isn't a very hard game to grasp...don't touch the ball with your hand, no cherry picking (offsides rule) and put the ball in your opponents net. Easy enough right? Now think about how many different styles there are to play the game? Even just in Europe there are divisions, if you watch Italy you'll see a very defensive and quick counter strike, a lot finesse play and great acting. Watch Germany and you see a very rigid, strict, controlled style of play and yet still very dangerous. Go over to Portugal and you see flair much like you see in Brazil, great individual play, fancy ball movement and whatnot. It is exciting I think to see all these different styles and see how they work against one another.

So lets pull it back to the Classic. Watch the Asian bracket, see the Japenese team play. They have different styles of batting and pitching and it looks nothing like the American style of play, yet they won the last Classic and the Americans didn't even sniff the Championship game. Watch the flair of the Latin American nations, the jumping up and down and dancing in the dugouts. I think its the most incredible thing to watch, we often think of baseball as just an American sport, but take a second to watch this Classic and you'll realize that it truly is growing into an International sport.

What will become of the World Baseball Classic? Well I think the IBAF (International Baseball Federation) will continue to grow into something more like FIFA and they will further take control of this competition and who knows maybe one day the fanfare of the World Cup of Soccer will be equaled by the WBC. It was a brilliant idea for MLB to start this and even more brilliant that they are beginning to turn it over to IBAF (half of the umpire crew is now IBAF umpires, half MLB instead of all MLB).

All I can say is go watch it and you'll know what I'm talking about.