If you have any interest in baseball, I hope you’ve been following the World Baseball Classic over the last week or so. It’s baseball’s attempt to build something like the World Cup, and despite this only being the second time through (the first one was in 2006) I think it’s really been quite impressive.
There are plenty of complaints, ranging from the fact that the players could get hurt (oh noes! athletes run the risk of injury while playing their sport?!) to an insistence that since there’s no history to it people shouldn’t care. They also might say that “the best players already all play in MLB and I can just watch them there.” To all that, I say phooey. There are great players in Cuba, Japan, and Korea and it’s awesome to watch them face off against the MLB stars. Also, things develop a history over time. The World Cup wasn’t treated as a truly big deal for decades – the European teams didn’t travel to the South American World Cups and vice versa. The WBC is neat, and I could very easily see it being an ingrained and important part of growing up as a baseball fan for a kid born in, say, 2020.
So far there have been more exciting, intense, and all-around awesome games than some MLB seasons get over the whole playoffs. Add in the astonishing results of the Netherlands beating the Dominican Republic not once but TWICE, and you’ve got something impressive. For an idea of just how unbalanced those Holland/Dutch games were, recognize that the DR is basically composed of established major league all-stars at every position, while the Dutch team was almost entirely compsoed of guys in A-ball, or playing in the Dutch league. Actually, if you just switch the teams and the sports – it’s approximately as shocking as it would be if the DR beat Holland twice in a week at soccer.
Also, the Dutch called baseball honkbal. Really.
The final complaint people have about the tournament is that they don’t like the way this sort of event encourages nationalism. They’re happy watching their MLB + the teams they’re used to rooting for and see no need to engage with this sort of event
Ironically, this is an incredibly American attitude: I like what I like – who needs the rest of the world. They want to impress me, come play in our league. The way I see it, the ability to declare baseball-nationalism a bad thing stems almost entirely from the security felt by being able to exist right in the middle an American baseball hegemony. All the best players have to come here to play, and we get to cheer for them on American (or Canadian if you support Toronto) teams, in and American environment. You don’t have to pay attention to the fact that Carlos Delgado feels Puero Rican. You don’t have to care that Miguel Cabrera comes from Venezuela. Sure, there’s no overt chants of “USA! USA!” but that’s precisely the point. Being able to call out nationalism is a luxury of those who exist in a world blanketed by American attitudes, cultural references, desires, economics, etc.
In my mind, there’s clearly a lot of problems with nationalism, but I’m far more worried about the American attitude of total dismissal (and ignorance) of anything the rest of the world has to offer than I am about some people cheering on the US in some baseball games.
The WBC is great because it’s the one format that puts baseball on display without assimilating all of these great players into the American norm. I say, it’s far better to channel your nationalism into the sporting arena, where you cheer your country, feel pain when you lose, but be willing to recognize the talent that other countries might also have on offer. There’s honor and mutual recognition that comes with the territory. As long as its engaged with that in mind, stuff like this seems a lot healthier than the alternative.