TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Friday, April 30, 2004

The Crank Speaks Out

As much as I'd normally be tempted today to weigh in on the biggest Craw in my Baseball Bonnet, historically speaking, the anti-trust-exemption inspired maldistribution of the markets, since it's one of the topcis of the day here in the Bullpen, I wanted to comment a little bit on the World Cup concept.

This is the best idea, ever, to come out of the Commissioner's office. OK, it didn't really come out of the Commissioner's office, but since the Czar is pumping it up these days, we'll pretend it is.

There's no "good" time to schedule a World Cup. The NHL seems to have regretted its decision to interrupt the hockey season during the Olympics to allow its players to effectively play a Hockey world cup and has been progressively retreating from the idea because they really didn't see the "bounce" it would have. There's zero chance MLB will give up on the gate for 30 teams for even a couple of weeks in the summer, and if the World Cup were played in November, not only would it further conflict with the busy fall sports season, it would probably fall prey to baseball ennui by a public that has just had a World Series and a set of very, very tired ballplayers. So March or nothing is the likely time for such an event.

But the NHL lesson is a good case in point about why I think the event would be a success. The players took the Olympics too seriously. Mario Lemieux played himself out of steam that could've been saved for the playoffs. Many other players played far more shifts than they would in the normally relatively-meaningless NHL regular season. It may have been the allure of Olympic gold (remember Roger Clemens "retirement" and how quickly it ended once the US squad was eliminated from Olympic qualification?), and it's possible a fake new "World Cup" will get all the attention from players that an opening series in Japan does -- all negative. But if the idea is allowed a few years to mature on its own, I strongly suspect it will become an event that would truly rival the "World" Series for the attention of the baseball public and would begin to make inroads into the public at large.

Americans may not take the international competition seriously. (How else to explain our abysmal record in Olympic baseball?) But you can bet the players from around the world would, most especially if it's a chance to beat us at our own game. Anybody who's had a taste of the Caribbean World Series knows that major leaguers playing in the winter leagues will leave it out on the field for a chance to compete on a nationalistic basis.

Part of me is ambivalent about this idea. What I do like about both the NHL and MLB these days is that the leagues are truly representative of the world-class of athletes in their sports, but that they're mixed around. You look at most MLB teams, it's representative of the rainbow of baseball, and to me that's a good thing. We have enough cheap nationalism in other areas not to have to taint sports with it (and anybody who's seen what parochial hooliganism has done to Soccer knows the dangers inherent in starting to associate strong feelings about sports with a national or ethnic identity.) The Ryder cup controversies in recent years show even "gentlemanly" games are subject to sudden devolution into pettiness when supposed national honor is put at stake. Good Lord, some players who've opted out of Davis Cup competition have been exorciated for lack of "patriotism", as if winning a Tennis trophy meant anything at all about a country's values and value.

Yet it's the oddly fractured nature of world baseball that probably would ovecome that. Unlike soccer-football, the number of countries with serious baseball leagues and/or signficant numbers of players is limited, and the same teams would be in the hunt for a (short) World Cup even everytime, probably limiting the win-at-any-cost frenzy of the Soccer World Cup. The US, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Japan, and Cuba are it; if you add in Puerto Rico (which, as I scream at the TV screen everytime some broadcaster calls it a foreign country, is part of the US!) and allow it to compete separately, as it does in Olympic and international amateur events, that makes seven "teams". If you took the rest of the Caribbean-Latin countries and Venezuela and made a false "Caribbean Basin" team, you could probably field another credible team, and then let South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia form a "Pacific Rim" team, there's another one. (Yes, yes, I know there are Olympic teams all over the place from other countries, but half the players in a given Olympic year are really Americans.)

Cuba, of course, is a whole 'nother story, since the politics of the situation, exhibitions against the Orioles a few years ago notwithstanding, probably would prevent it from competing.

So let's say there are eight teams that might compete in a World Cup. I know the people of Mexico, the DR, and Japan would take it seriously, and the US market is big enough that enough people would take it seriously to be worthwhile. You would, in turn, certainly be able to convince enough players to play. So the key issue is: would the MLB owners? The answer to that question is very simple: fiat from the Commissioner's office that prevents any team from explicitly prohibiting a player from participating in a World Cup. I realize subtle pressures will be applied that will prevent some players from participating, but it can't be enough to really hurt any one good team.

And we're talking all-star teams here. Assuming a 25-man roster, and about two weeks for the Cup, you could have a round-robin round the first week, followed by best two-of-three elimination semifinals and finals in the second week. Half the players would be back in spring training a week after it began, everybody after two weeks. You can bet that players would arrive in spring training in good shape. Pitching is always a concern here, but rules enforced allowing no pitcher to throw more than 5 innings in a game and 10 innings total in the entire tournament would not only protect the pitchers, it would provide a little bit of a level playing field so a team couldn't just cruise on one or two dominant arms (and thus, for example, ruin the Red Sox' chances at a World Series championship just so Pedro Martinez can bring home the Cup for the D.R.)

What is particularly laudatory here is the idea it should be done as early as 2005. Why wait until everything is "perfect"? Start playing some games and see how it goes.

I'm under no delusions this will ever get to be like a Soccer World Cup -- the biggest event in sports, period, because it's for a sport played virtually everywhere and which is played in short one-game matches. But it could really be a great way of sandwiching the MLB season maybe every third year with something special, and would be a source of pride in many countries that are progressively being sucked dry of their talent by MLB. We don't want to kill baseball in Japan, for instance, even though we're taking their best players right now -- we want it to be part and parcel of the same community.

Game on, er, whatever. Let's do this.

posted by The Crank 3:44 PM