I am addicted to the WBC.
No that isn’t an anabolic steroid that Barry Bonds is accused of
using.
Still, my addiction to it reveals something lacking in Major
League Baseball.
I am addicted to the WBC.
No that isn’t an anabolic steroid that Barry Bonds is accused of using.
Still, my addiction to it reveals something lacking in Major League Baseball.
For the uninitiated, WBC stands for World Baseball Classic, and it threatens to burn me out on baseball before one pitch is thrown at AT&T Park this season.
With its short, round-robin tournament-style construction, every game has the feeling of an October pennant race. It is almost too much for a casual baseball fan like me – the sort who used to complain when my dad would watch slow-paced baseball games on channel 2 or 36 (depending on which Bay Area team was playing).
I have since learned to appreciate the drama of televised games and have thus been transfixed as the best in the business go about in the WBC’s all-star matchups, without all the pomp and circumstance connected with totally-American sporting events.
With thankfully absent (and therefore less distracting) celebrity first pitches and ceremonies honoring so-and-so, the baseball is put into sharp focus, even with Cuban fans and anti-Fidel Castro activists stirring things up.
What has been missing in American baseball has also been put into sharp focus at the Classic. What was once about a game has become strictly business in the MLB – players go to their jobs with the same monotony that is satirized in films about the drudges of working in office cubicles.
By contrast, in the WBC tournament everything has regressed back to the classic days of old when kids who grew up on the same block and had the same heroes are playing together. The problem is that back in those days the United States was arguably the greatest contributor to the sports world.
Now the U.S. has won only one game in the second round of the tournament – and that win was handed to Team U.S.A. because of an appealed call that should never have been appealed and that the umpire never should have overruled.
The caliber of baseball played by the U.S. team in the tournament so far seems woefully below par with even the most conservative estimates.
The U.S. must return to the sandlot.
We need to take away Morgan Hill Pony Baseball, Hollister Babe Ruth and Gilroy Little League. We need to take away pressed and dry-cleaned uniforms and coaching dads, hitting videotapes and year-round traveling teams. They are obviously doing us no good as a sport-playing nation. We are still constantly devouring thousands of Dominican second basemen, Venezuelan shortstops, Puerto Rican catchers, Japanese outfielders and Korean pitchers (and, when they become available, Cuban pitchers as well).
And they are handing us our hats.
All this despite learning to hit with broomsticks and learning to field with milk cartons cut in half for mitts.
Let us at least return to the setting of one of the most celebrated coming-of-age/ baseball movies of all time, The Sandlot.
Two springs ago I organized a phone tree to start pickup games at Bernal Elementary School in North Morgan Hill and got almost 30 names on it. Sure, the field actually had a home plate, pitchers mound and dugouts. But the operation was guerilla enough that we had to jump fences and were forced to use a sweatshirt as second base more than once.
That is the sort of baseball I see in the eyes of some of the players in the WBC – my favorite baseball, the sort of baseball that is played, not performed.
As an admittedly casual fan (relative to my friends who keep track of a mind-boggling amount of stats and trades) you would be correct in pointing out that I am in no place to lecture the community.
But as a photographer for The Pinnacle I shoot dozens of baseball and softball games, and have studied images of hundreds more games while trying to improve my knowledge of how to shoot the game well.
And while I am trained in catching the moments of pivotal gestures of victory and defeat, it doesn’t take that level of trained eyes to reveal that everyone playing in the WBC – who isn’t under the pressure of being from the country the game was birthed in (or a communist dictatorship) – is having a good time. I’d like to think this is because they are sitting on the ground in a minor-league ball park in San Juan, Puerto Rico, playing the game they love with men who, 20 years earlier, played in the same uncoiffed, back-alley lots with a bunch of other Spanish- or Korean-speaking kids.
Time for full disclosure. I am rooting for Mexico, whose sole purpose in this tournament is to guarantee full attendance at any stadium they might play in. Though I was born and raised in San Martin, and worshiped the A’s whiter “Bash Brother” growing up, I needed to go with my heritage on this one.
At least the glee in their eyes has not been rubbed away.
Editor’s Note: This column was written on Monday during the 2nd round robin of the tournament. As of press time Cuba, Korea and the Dominican Republic had qualified for the semifinals with the US and Mexico yet to play for the final spot.
