After lively title game, perhaps next WBC should end in Japan
By Scott Miller | CBSSports.com Senior Writer Follow ScottLOS ANGELES -- First, our auto industry. Now, our national pastime.
What's next, Japan conquering our fast-food industry? Taking over our rock 'n' roll?
Seriously.
|
|
| Ichiro and Japan's fans have been a boon to the WBC. Maybe they'll be rewarded with a bigger host's role in 2013. (AP) |
Following a bleak two days' worth of semifinals here, Japan and Korea provided the possibilities of what this thing could evolve into. They produced 10 spirited, splendid innings of baseball, replete with hard (and clean) slides, razor-sharp fielding, on-the-mark bunting, exquisite execution, pinch-hitters, strategy every which way and, above all, heart.
In the stands, from a WBC-record crowd of 54,846, there were chants, cheers, streamers and thunder sticks. Flags, banners, singing and dancing. Surely, when they drew up the blueprint for the WBC, this is what they meant.
It took 10 innings and a sensational Ichiro Suzuki at-bat, an eight-pitch number with two outs and two aboard and a wildly enthusiastic crowd on its feet, roaring. The legendary Ichiro capped it by drilling a single up the middle to score two after fighting off four two-strike pitches, slicing three fouls and taking one outside.
It was a kaleidoscope of fun, a carnival of color. Whistles. Drums. All of Los Angeles' Koreatown and Little Tokyo must have been there. Unlike a regular-season Dodgers crowd, there was darn little leaving early to beat the traffic, too. When young Japan wunderkind Yu Darvish closed out the Koreans in the 10th at 10:39 p.m. local time, Dodger Stadium was still nearly packed.
And it all brings up the question:
If, in the United States, the WBC ranks somewhere between doing the laundry and changing your oil, why shouldn't we just hand Japan the keys to the semifinals and final of the 2013 WBC?
Bring the tournament to the champions, place it in the Land of Rising Sun Insatiable Baseball Interest?
"We've played opening day in Japan, and that was even later in March," said Paul Archey, major league baseball's senior vice-president for international business operations. "I think anything is feasible, sure. We played a couple of spring training games in China last year."
Of course, many of the major leaguers who have gone abroad usually gripe about the long flights and screwy time zones.
Then again, more of them than not aren't thrilled with the notion of flying within the continental United States to participate in the WBC, let alone anywhere else. So it isn't as if placing the tournament championship in Japan (or Korea or the Dominican Republic or somewhere else) next time would severely squeeze the pool of possible major leaguers, anyway.
Still, don't count on it. Tough as it is to get major leaguers who aren't Dominican, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan or Japanese to play, logistically, scheduling the WBC championship overseas still seems a non-starter. And reading between the lines, Archey wasn't exactly brimming with enthusiasm when addressing the WBC-final-four-in-Japan angle.
The television ratings in the U.S. would stink, because the games would be played in the wee morning hours, local time.
Then again, they're not exactly boffo now.
"It wouldn't help the ratings," Archey admitted. Though when the majors have staged opening days in Japan, he noted, "we're not playing at a time when it would get high ratings here. ... That's one of the things you consider. It's one of the factors, just as warm-weather cities are."
Meanwhile, the title game started at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning in Japan, and yet they still expected 40 percent of the population to watch -- Super Bowl-like ratings, in American terms.
Team Japan convened training camp on Feb. 15, and when they trained in southern Japan for a week in late February, 40,000 or so fans attended workouts each day, watching Ichiro, Akinori Iwamura, Kenji Johjima, Norichika Aoki, Michihiro Ogasawara and the rest take batting practice.
Their manager, Tatsunori Hara, is the skipper of the Yomiuri Giants in the Japan Central League, and he has guided the Giants to three Central League pennants in five seasons. It's the equivalent of, say, Tony La Russa or Terry Francona managing Team USA.
Instead, a cardboard cutout looking suspiciously like Davey Johnson sat in the pilot's chair in the Team USA dugout.
For the tournament, of Japan's 92 hits, 74 (80 percent) were singles. They moved runners, hit behind runners, scored runners. So, too, did Korea, which played Japan five times in this WBC -- losing three of the five.
In any country, in any language, the WBC title game was a classic. It was great fun. Almost too much fun. When Japan's Hiroyuki Nakajima tried to break up the double play that ended the seventh -- not only with a hard slide into second but by then grabbing the legs of Korean infielder Young Min Ko -- he looked like the Steelers' James Harrison coming in for a sack.
Cuba, conquered by Japan in the '06 WBC final, ranks as the only non-Asian club to play in a WBC title game in the two times it has been held.
"The baseball played in those countries, they play sound," Team USA outfielder Shane Victorino said before heading back to rejoin the Phillies in Florida this week. "They play sound, free, errorless baseball."
Among other things, Victorino raved about how "between innings, they're all throwing with each other. During pitching changes, the fielders are all playing catch. It's the way they play. ...
"They want to play as perfect baseball as they can, and that's how you win ballgames."
"It's been great," Archey said. "We said after 2006 that we thought the second tournament would be better, and I think it has been. You look on the field, you certainly can see the [competitive] gap narrowing."
He pointed to the Netherlands defeating the Dominican Republic, Italy beating Canada, Australia beating Mexico.
"The objective is to grow the game internationally," Archey said. "That's objective No. 1. Japan and Korea, the level of these two teams has always been good, but you didn't used to see guys throwing 96, 97 coming out of the bullpen. ...
"It's still a baby. It's in its growing phase. But I think it's proven its success."
Even if most of the U.S. remains tuned out, paying more attention to March Madness and economy badness.
"I don't know that it's been a struggle," Archey said. "It's a challenge. But it's not a challenge that I look at and say we haven't met. It's March, yet major league baseball hasn't even started, and you [have] 50,000 people in Dodger Stadium tonight watching Japan and Korea."
Yeah? Just think how the thing could really take off if the semifinals and final were scheduled elsewhere. Somewhere other than, say, the United States.
