Welcome

It'll be interesting to see if anyone finds this.  (If you're reading at all, please comment--let me know what you think.)

The idea for this was born just after the 2009 World Baseball Classic.  I looked forward to that tournament.  I watched most of it.  There was some great baseball in it (and some pretty gawd-awful baseball, too, but that's the nature of baseball, particularly baseball in March).  The final game, in which Korea came back to tie the game with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but then coughed up the RBI single to Ichiro Suzuki in the top of the 10th, was one of the best games I've ever seen.  

And yet--and yet--in talking about the games with people, it's clear that even a lot of self-professed baseball fans just weren't into this.  Some typical comments I overheard, read, or otherwise found:

"People would rather be watching the Grapefruit League."

"It destroys Spring Training."

"Why risk injuring players for what is basically an exhibition?"

"It's another bad idea by Bud Selig."

"The best players skipped the thing, so why should I care if they don't?"

"It's too long." (Okay, that one is fair.)

And the few members of the American press that decided to profess their opinion of the thing seemed to agree with the above sentiment.  Here is one typical example, from my home-town paper.  True, that's from Greg Couch, the guy the Sun-Times pays to be shrill, so it's a little on the shrill side.  But you get the idea.

Bottom line is, international baseball just doesn't rate here in the USA.  People think that what in Europe they'd call "the domestic club competition" is and forever will be the only one that matters.  And maybe they have a point, at least about the WBC.  Maybe the WBC isn't the international tournament that baseball needs--and certainly, the WBC needs fixing (but that's another post).  

But it raises a bigger issue, namely that people in the US don't follow, or really know a thing about, any baseball that happens outside their borders.  Because the WBC was a HUGE big deal in Japan, and Korea, and Cuba, and Venezuela.  It actually momentarily caused baseball to reach the front sports pages in the Netherlands, even.  And we didn't even notice.

There are professional leagues in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Germany.  There's winter ball throughout the Caribbean nations.  We never hear about any of it.  So it occurred to me that there's a lot to be said about international baseball.  Some of this will be news, some just thoughts.  I hope it'll be useful for some, informative for others.