The World Baseball Classic is cool as hell
I'd say sorry to the haters, but you know what, Keith Olbermann? I'm not sorry.
I mean, that’s the takeaway from the last couple weeks of this tournament, right? It is. It has to be. There’s no other way to say it. Because this whole thing has been cool as hell.
A normal Spring Training game is a novelty. Hey, there hasn’t been any baseball for a while and now there’s baseball! Cool! Then, an hour in, most of the major league players get taken out. Okay, these guys are playing as hard as they can, which is…nice, I guess. Then it’s a couple innings later, and you realize the score is 9-4, and your team is losing, and you don’t care. A reliever whose name you heard once gave up five straight doubles to a lineup featuring one guy you’ve ever heard of.
Maybe you finish the game out, maybe you don’t, but it doesn’t matter. What is happening in front of you makes no difference. It is ephemeral. It is vacuous content. You will not remember it in a week’s time.
And then a WBC year comes along and, holy shit, this fucking rules.
It wasn’t just last night’s game, which was a phenomenal example of everything baseball does right. It was just about the whole tournament. Sure, you had the occasional dud game like the US crushing Cuba or most of the games China played, but you also had surprisingly tense games like Mexico edging Great Britain, or Cube knocking out Australia.
You had classics like Mexico’s comeback over Puerto Rico and the US beating Venezuela behind an eighth inning go-ahead grand slam. Then you had last night’s game, where Japan’s first lead over Mexico came when the winning run crossed the plate in the bottom of the ninth.
One theme here is that Mexico’s team was really, really fun.
I don’t want to talk too much about what a great game last night’ was, because the whole tournament has been great. On the other hand, we should at least bring up what a great game last night’s was:
Thank you, Sarah Langs, the deserved winner of the Most Popular Baseball Tweeter award.
Now that we’ve addressed the ecstatic highs of a great baseball game by showing a chart, we can move on to the larger point: People cared about the WBC. People really cared about the WBC. That’s the thing that you watch sports for, that makes it worthwhile. A guy hitting a ball with a stick means nothing unless the guy throwing the ball and the guy swinging at the ball have something riding on it. You need stakes, or the game lacks meaning.
And the WBC has stakes. Players want to represent their countries. Players want to make their homes proud of them. Yes, there have been injuries, but injuries also happen in Spring Training (in games that are actually meaningless); Madison Bumgarner in 2018 comes to mind. The only certain way to avoid getting injured playing baseball is to not play baseball, and this newsletter will not abide abstinence-only baseball education.
A large segment of the players desperately want to be there, though. Even with the risk of being hurt, the reward of playing for your country is worth it. Just ask Francisco Lindor, for example:
Or ask Randy Arozarena, who defected from Cuba to Mexico in the middle of the 2010s, settled his wife, mother, and family in Mexico, then asked the Mexican president for citizenship just so he could represent Mexico in the WBC, where he carried the team to the semi-finals, and almost to the finals.
Not every player loves it, no. But the ones who do? The ones who show up? They give everything they have because they deeply, intensely care. You can’t ask anything more than that.
What about the fans? Well, there are some segments of fans1 who get into it. Extremely into it. Extremely, delightfully into it.
Do American fans act like they’re too cool for this thing, like it’s a sideshow to the real baseball season that starts at the end of March? Some of them, yeah. They do. And who gives a shit?
There are so many people who love this event. When you see the stands in Japan or Taiwan, or the Latin diaspora in the stands in Miami, you see an electric crowd that’s living and dying with every pitch. That’s what you want. That’s what you need. That’s all there is.
And the WBC is making new baseball fans. The entire point of this event is to make people worldwide interested in baseball, and it’s working.
If that was the WBC’s only contribution, it would be enough. But it’s a great event on its own. It’s fun, it’s meaningful, it’s tense, it’s dramatic, it’s exciting. It’s why we watch sports. So let’s watch the hell out of some sports tonight.
All non-Americans
This. I was in Puerto Rico last week, and my family went to a nice restaurant during the Mexico-Puerto Rico game. The waitresses were all wearing Javy Baez Puerto Rico shirseys, and the bar was full of patrons and staff watching the game intently. These folks love their baseball and their team. Great game! Great time!