The World Baseball Classic may have its detractors. Ichiro Suzuki may have his detractors. But there is no one that can dispute this statement:Ichiro really wanted to win the World Baseball Classic.
For all but the few of you who watched the championship of the WBC, it went 10 innings and ended about 10 minutes ago. Ichiro had a whale of a game, and drove in the winning runs in the top of the 10th inning to give Japan the WBC title again. They won 5-3 over Korea.
I'm not sure how I feel about the WBC. I've watched a little of it, but obviously if I really cared, I would have watched a lot more of it. I just have a hard time watching my country's team when I'm not even sure how much they care. I do think the players on the team care. Most of them anyway. But the restrictions on the pitching and the comments about how an injured player could have played if it was an "important" game makes me wonder why anyone should be paying attention to this.
So, in my eyes, yeah, the right team won. Japan won. The team that cared -- 100 percent -- won.
Maybe the U.S. shouldn't send a team to the WBC until we can figure out whether we really care about this thing or not.
Comments
If you take the WBC for what it is -- an opportunity for people outside the United States to get excited about baseball, good. If you look at it as being the equivalent of soccer's World Cup, then you are going to be disappointed.
That being said, I didn't like Ichiro Suzuki when he first came over because he seemed like one of these self-aggrandizing people who was coming here to take advantage of money. He may be all that, I don't know. But what I have seen since he came here is a devoted baseball player who has a greater love for the game and its history than most American born players and for that I can be a big fan of Suzuki. I just can't put his first name on the back of a uniform.