bring on the world

Tomorrow morning at 1:30am here on the West Coast, we will see the commencement of the second incarnation of something that history may look back on as a failed experiment, or that may emerge as an institution along the lines of the World Cup.

I am speaking, of course, about the World Baseball Classic.

This tournament, which first took place in 2006, will kick off in Tokyo with a match between China and Japan (the last tournament's champion). It is an intriguing match-up, to be sure: a country that regularly produces major league baseball stars and has a top-tier professional league almost on par with MLB, and a country where the sport has little to no following at present. I love that the tourney features both countries where baseball is a national institution (the USA, the Dominican Republic, etc) and countries where baseball is, at least as far as I understand, a marginal sport (South Africa, Italy, etc).

I am much more invested in this second World Baseball Classic than I was in the first, mostly because my sister and I will be going to the tournament final at Dodger Stadium at the end of this month. I am rooting for the USA to win, not because I have a great deal of patriotic pride, but because the team ace is my current favorite Astro, Roy Oswalt, and I'd like to see him pitch. (My other pick is Korea, because I think they got gypped by beating Japan twice in 2006 yet still not making to the final, they're a country that most people don't realize has a rich baseball heritage, and I probably have more friends from that country than any other in the tourney, sans, of course, the US.)


For some reason, I'm attracted to marginal sporting events. I also attended the 2006 MLS Cup, where I and two of my roommates saw my hometown Houston Dynamo best the New England Revolution on penalty kicks. The only catch is that the vast majority of Americans don't care about soccer, and those who do generally either follow Premier League or Mexican teams. (I saw the Dynamo play Mexican team C.F. Pachuca in Houston, and at least half the crowd was Pachuca supporters.)

And now, I am excited to go to a baseball tournament in which most American major leaguers declined to participate because they didn't deem it worth their time. What gives?


Two things come to mind:

1) A friend of mine once spent his Spring Break on a university campus in central Mexico. During a conversation with one of the students, the Mexican student made the observation that Americans don't play the sports the rest of the world plays, but make up their own. It's completely true: baseball, basketball, and American football all took their contemporary forms on American soil, and hockey has a distinctively Canadian flavor. Baseball and especially basketball may be global sports now, but you still haven't really "made it" in those sports unless you're in MLB or the NBA.

2) In his book Beyond Christendom, my professor Dr. Jehu Hanciles refers to the tendency for Western events to be given greater weight than developments in the Southern world as the "World Series Approach." In his words, "The fact that this is a national tournament (mainly confined to American teams) renders the description 'World' (first used in 1903) a glaring misnomer and evocative of overblown cultural hubris" (p. 38, footnote). Ouch. I can't say it's inaccurate, though.


I suppose one reason I like the WBC and Major League Soccer is because, even though they are still very America-centric, they are both places where the US looks outside of itself and interacts with the rest of the world. I find myself more interested when the Houston Dynamo are playing teams from other countries than when they are playing regulation matches against other MLS teams, and I think that whoever wins the WBC has a much greater right to be called a "world champion" than the Phillies, who won last year's "World" Series. In a world as interconnected and globalized as this, we cannot afford to let our sight stop at our own borders. So, I say let's bring on the world.


Then again, I also just like the sport of baseball, and I am not sure that I'm going to be able to see my Houston Astros play in person this year. Let's go Team USA, I want to see Roy O pitch!