You probably didn’t hear about it, but the World Baseball Classic just started. Don’t feel like you are out of the loop; no one seems to know or care much about the WBC. And although you have March Madness, spring training, or maybe your own fulfilling career to distract you from creeping existential angst, I want to make the argument that you should focus on the WBC.
(I would be remiss if I did not mention that Michael Baumann over at the Ringer made his own list of reasons to watch the WBC. It’s a quick, fun read, so click over there if you need more convincing. He also touches on at least two of the points I will bring up.)
1. Prospects, prospects, prospects. One of the main problems with the WBC–at least the United States team–is that it has trouble enticing the real stars of the game to take time out of their preseason workouts and exhibition games to play internationally. Seen another way, though, this can also be one of the biggest opportunities of the tournament: the hole left by veteran ballplayers is readily filled by the young up-and-comers of the game. The WBC can be one of the best ways to get a look at the players who will be leading the MLB in a few short years.
2. They have a bracket, so you won’t have to miss the communal part of March Madness. Just get some friends together and see who can guess which country will go all the way. Does the Dominican Republic have what it takes to repeat 2013? Or will the perennially solid Japanese team rise to the occasion? With any luck, all of our brackets will be shot by the end of March, finally clearing the path for the United States to collect a WBC title.
3. It’s an alternative to spring training. If you are a consummate baseball fan like me, you want to enjoy the game as soon as possible. You were on Twitter all winter, reading Jon Heyman and Ken Rosenthal’s feeds, trying to find any informational morsel to nourish you until spring. Then when spring training arrives, you’re forced to keep up the facade that exhibition games are what you have been waiting for all year. But alas, spring training just isn’t meaningful enough. The WBC can be that bridge to competitive baseball. Instead of watching teams field half-strength lineups in glorified scrimmages, why not watch a real tournament for international glory? Then, just when the WBC is over and we are all done processing, the first pitches will be thrown on opening day.
4. It shows you the scale and influence of the sport. As an American, I think it is easy to take baseball for granted. One of the most beautiful things about the game is that it happens everyday from April until October, giving us a way to mark the progress of the middle of the year. But this omnipresence can lend itself to complacency. If my team plays every evening at 7, why bother listening in or reading the box score? The entire season is so long that every individual game loses any sense of urgency or importance when you are face-to-face with the sheer scale of the entire endeavor.
But the WBC allows us to take a step back and get a global perspective. We can see how the game that is uniquely ours (or our own bastardization of a game played in England centuries ago, depending on how you look at it) has been taken up by other countries, molded by their own cultures and perspectives, with the same basic rules holding sway, but with entirely different styles and characters emerging to fill the gaps in those rules. In the end, we are left to grapple with the question: Is baseball really is America’s game? Does America even want it anymore? Sure the MLB is making money hand over fist, but the American fan base is aging and today’s youngsters just aren’t into baseball like their grandparents were.
On the other hand, maybe baseball isn’t for America anymore, but it has ascended to some higher plane. Maybe it is a citizen of the world. Like those other uniquely American innovations of jazz and the Constitution, maybe baseball is just some vague framework that anyone can paint their own ideals and prejudices onto. If so, watching the WBC lets us experience other cultures through the lens of baseball. It’s just a simple bat and ball sport, but for much of the twentieth century the world could have learned a lot about Americans by understanding the game: what they valued, who their heroes were like, even how they felt about labor versus capital. Maybe now in the twenty-first century, baseball is what Americans need to understand the world.
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