World Baseball Classic

I’ve spent good chunks of the last three evenings watching the
finals and semifinals of the World Baseball
Classic (WBC). Here are some random thoughts:

• Other things being equal, I was rooting for the team with
  the fewest major leaguers on it. I’ve always found it offensive
  that the Major League
  championship should be called the World Series, when all the
  eligible teams are located in two countries, neither of which
  seems to ever win a real world
  championship. Of course, other things weren’t equal — I
  usually felt like rooting for the Red Sox players I like, and I
  watched the finals with a Japanese friend, so I rooted for Japan
  over South Korea, even though Japan has several times as many major
  leaguers on their team.
• I was annoyed that they abandoned play-by-play for a large
  chunk of the close-fought final game for an interview with the
  Commissioner of Major League Baseball. Baseball broadcasts tend
  to do this more casually than I like anyway, but you would think
  they would take a championship final a little more
  seriously.
• Besides, the interview was not illuminating. They asked the
  Commissioner what could be done it increase fan interest in the
  WBC. Nobody mentioned the idea of putting more of it on TV,
  or some of it on broadcast TV.
• If the Commissioner had been asked about TV coverage, he
  probably would have said that people with internet connections
  could watch it online at mlb.com. This isn’t true for anyone I
  know who’s tried. Admittedly I tried 3 years ago, but a friend
  who’s a big baseball fan and doesn’t have cable tried this
  month, using his Mac with DSL, and found it unwatchable.
• An article I read before the WBC started said that it wasn’t
  going to be a real world championship until you could get 16
  teams without using weak entries like Italy and the
  Netherlands. In fact, both of those teams did quite well. What
  you would write with 20/20 hindsight is that you won’t get a
  good world championship until the semifinals can have 4 teams
  that are all better then Venezuela was on Saturday against South
  Korea. I didn’t see enough of the preceding games to be able to
  tell whether Venezuela was better at the beginning or whether
  they really got to the semifinals by beating teams that were
  even worse than that. The couple of games I saw earlier in the
  tournament were better than that.
• I couldn’t figure out what the point of the pitch-count
  limitations was. I assume it’s to mollify the MLB
  managers who don’t want their players used up before the season
  starts. But it might have been to prevent a Davis Cup type
  situation where a country with a good pitcher and one or two
  good hitters can embarrass the countries with lots of good
  players. But that would be good television, if it
  happened.
• The official scorers seemed a little error-happy to me. I
  saw several plays ruled as errors that if the player had made
  it, I would have been impressed. One particularly memorable one
  was on Sunday night, when Ichiro was batting for Japan against
  the US team. He hit what normally would be a routine ground
  ball to third except:
  • Ichiro is one of the fastest runners in baseball, so he
    beat it out.
  • The third baseman’s throw to first was a little
    wide.
  • The US team didn’t have a real first baseman, and were
    using a converted shortstop, and he had his right foot on the
    bag, when the throw was wide to his right side, so he could
    have stretched better if he’d had his left foot on the bag.

  I would have probably given Ichiro a hit, but the scorer ruled
  it a throwing error by the third baseman.