The World Baseball Classic finally ended March 20, with Japan defeating Cuba 10-6 to capture the inaugural title. Now, we can praise the Lord and pass the biscuits.
Not that it was that important anyway. The Little League World Series was more exciting than the WBC.
Yes, a global baseball tournament was certainly a good idea, but baseball needs a serious image makeover since being polluted with steroids. The WBC was just poorly planned, operated and executed.
From the tournament layout to the timing, everything about the WBC was just wrong-wrong I tell you. I mean, what were these idiots thinking by placing a tournament of this caliber during Major League Baseball’s spring training?
Common sense would tell anyone this just wasn’t going to work. And what about Team USA? We just can’t claim that baseball is our game, have the majority of the tournament on our turf, put together an all-century like team and then fail to make it to the semifinals. It just isn’t supposed to work out like that.
But then again, this was partly constructed by the most idiotic baseball commissioner in history, Bud Selig. This is the same dummy that wants to investigate Barry Bonds because of what he read in a book.
So now that we’ve established the WBC needs some serious fine-tuning, here is what I propose.
First, the United States needs to stop bragging about baseball being our game; it’s not. Baseball belongs mostly to Hispanics. If you look at today’s elite players, the majority of them come from places like the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. Besides, baseball isn’t even this country’s most popular sport. NASCAR has taken that title.
For the second order of business, how about adopting the Federal International Football Association (that’s soccer, not American football) tournament system. Since it was the inaugural year of the WBC, we can be a little lenient on the system they chose to use. But it shouldn’t have been as bad as it was.
This whole Team A beating Team B but losing to Team C but Team A is out of the tournament because Team B beat Team C system is just too confusing. Ranking each country’s team would solve everything.
Get a bunch of credible baseball analysts from across the world to rank each team and create a bracket similar to that of the FIFA World Cup. This way everyone will be able to understand what’s what.
Lastly, no more baseball tournaments should be played before spring training. If the WBC wants to be exciting, they must have the tournament when athletes are into the flow of playing games, not while they’re warming up for a 162 game season.
I propose the WBC be played every four years in place of an All-Star game. That way, the athletes are ready to play, the competition is greater and the tournament is more entertaining.
Point blank, the World Baseball Classic was a perfect example of an innovative idea that went wrong. I hope whoever decides the run this tournament the next time will take notes from this year’s failure.
But who knows?
With the way things seem to be going, the United States might just lose to South Africa in the World Baseball Classic.
Morgan L. McDaniel is a sophomore journalism student from Detroit. He can be reached at McDaniel7113@aol.com