2009 World Baseball Classic

The first game of the World Baseball Classic will be taking place in this pool on March 2. If you are not familiar with the setup of the World Baseball Classic, each pool consists of four teams. These four teams play a round-robin format, where the top two teams will advance into the next round. All games in the World Baseball Classic can be seen on MLB Network.

It's baseball's version of the Olympiad.

After a four-year hiatus, the World Baseball Classic is back in 2013. With it comes the potential and the hope that the event can capture the attention of even more fans than it did back in 2009.

It will be interesting to see how the plot unfolds in the tournament for international baseball bragging rights.

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Provisional rosters for teams participating in the 2013 World Baseball Classic were released on Thursday. Although they are exactly that, provisional, and therefore likely to change prior to the opening round of pool play on March 2, they do offer a general idea about the quality of each squad.

Dear America,

The World Series should no longer hold that title. For the title "World Series" implies the whole world.

So why are the World Series Champs called the World Champions?

Because MLB teams are the best, right?

Wrong.

The days of American baseball dominance have long been over and it has taken until now to prove it.

By defeating Korea for their second straight World Baseball Classic championship, Japan has a legitimate claim to call themselves the World's best baseball nation.

Japan will face South Korea tonight to determine the WBC championship.

Japan is defending this title, which they acquired in 2006, and will place Hisashi Iwakuma on the mound to face Korea’s Jung Keun Bong.

The Korean WBC team only has one MLB player compared to Venezuela’s 22 and Choo Shin-Soo from the Cleveland Indians made sure it didn’t go unnoticed hitting a three run homer in the first inning off Carlos Silva. Silva gave up seven runs in 1.1 innings sealing Korea’s  position in  the finals on Monday with a 10-2 victory. Venezuela set a record committing five errors, the most ever in a single WBC game.

There is a Red Sox blog called Boston Dirt Dogs that is complaining that the World Baseball Classic is doing quite the number on their players, and thinks that Derek Jeter may have had something to do with Kevin Youkilis’s ankle injury.

They don’t say a whole lot, but they did have this nugget.

The 39-game tournament that includes 16 teams expanded into other countries this year. Games were played in Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Japan, and the expansion has helped even in this time of recession.

“From a ratings standpoint, from an attendance standpoint, and more importantly from an acceptance standpoint...it really is doing everything we hoped it would do,” MLB President Bob DuPuy said.

Team Puerto Rico reminded me of the 2008 Mets in the way they lost to Team USA.

Team Puerto Rico was leading Team USA 5-3 going into the bottom of the ninth inning. Pedro Feliciano reminded me of last year, and to most Puerto Rico fans, it wasn't good. He did not have good command and put himself in a hole.

The Puerto Rican team had a chance to get out of it with a double play, but Carlos Delgado was pulled off the bag. It was all downhill from there.

Team USA is falling apart at the seams more each passing day, and last night, they suffered another blow. The game did and will continue to go on, but with few to no reserves, it is getting scarier by the minute. Reserves can and will be called on for the semifinals this weekend, but their effectiveness in this tournament will remain to be seen in front of the world.