WBC Deserves Truly Global Presence

Four of the last 10 MVPs in Major League Baseball have been from countries outside the United States, including one from Canada, Twins' first baseman Justin Morneau.

Three of the last five American League Cy Young Awards went to two pitchers -- Johan Santana, twice, and Bartolo Colon, once -- born in Latin countries.

Half of the last eight American League batting champions were born in foreign countries, including Ichiro Suzuki from Japan.

The origins of baseball may be debatable. Did it come from the Russian game lapta or the English game rounders? Did Abner Doubleday really invent it or was his story just better than Alexander Cartwright's?

But there is one truth about baseball that is self-evident now: Like most everything else these days, it is no longer best made in America – unless you mean, maybe, Latin America. A third of major league players now come from Latin countries and Asia. Forty percent are of color. Baseball has been undergoing a sea change in its make up for some time now that is almost as dramatic as that Jackie Robinson ushered in.

As such, the World Baseball Classic, where Japan beat South Korea on Monday for the crown, is much truer to its name now than the World Series. For anyone here to dismiss it simply because the red, white and blue didn't field its best team and got walloped by Japan in the semifinals is nothing other than jingoistic gibberish. That was the best slap hitter in all of baseball, Ichiro, coming through on Monday night in the clutch for his country.

That fact reminds me, too: Why is it that U.S. baseball stars that opted not to participate in the second WBC were spared the venom that was spewed at U.S. basketball stars who turned down requests to play for the U.S. Olympic team in Athens in 2004? Why isn't anybody questioning their patriotism? Was it the basketball players' tattoos?

"We have to try to push up the intensity for the U.S. team and have to find ways to get our best players and make sure they're out there,'' Selig said during ESPN's telecast of the WBC. "Everybody who has ever played [in the WBC] loves it ... We have to pick up the selection process. We need, as the other countries do, to get the very best players we have.''

But I digress.

There is nothing wrong with the WBC. True, it is difficult to schedule. Before the season, during the season and after the season are equally tough times to carve out. But that didn't stop a lot of Major League stars for the other countries from showing up and their fans from turning out and tuning in. The MVP of the 2009 WBC was, once again, Red Sox star pitcher from Japan, Daisuke Matsuzake. The Japanese and Korean fans that turned out Monday night in L.A. made that a record WBC crowd of 54,856.

There should've been a lot more Major Leaguers on the runner-up squad from South Korea other than Cleveland outfielder Choo Shin-soo, who tied the title game early with a homer. After all, South Korea beat Japan twice earlier in the tournament and won gold in Beijing after taking bronze in Athens. For whatever reasons, major league teams have been slow to import South Koreans. This WBC should change that.

The South Koreans won't have the Olympics to show off at any more now that the game has been thrown out of the Olympics. So a WBC put on every four years will have to suffice. It should do better than merely survive.

But if not enough supporters among us like it -- be they general managers or players or fans -- then so be it. We don't deserve it. We shouldn't have it. We shouldn't be able to monopolize the WBC anyway.

The WBC shouldn't be changed, and doesn't need to be altered, to satisfy our palate. It should be boosted to the taste of those around the world -- in Asia, the Caribbean, South America, and the Netherlands, even -- who are now longing for our one-time national pastime.

Major League Baseball and American baseball fans should feel a sense of pride about what happened in the just-completed edition of the WBC. It's game has been not only embraced by much of the rest of the world, but celebrated. The NFL, our new national pastime, never fared so well with its across the border skirmishes. Baseball finally beat football at something.

The game shouldn't rest on these laurels, though. After two WBCs, it is time to take the championship on the road where it is already beloved. Early round games shouldn't be pawned off on the real fans overseas, like those in Seoul who skipped work and school on Monday to watch the big game on a jumbotron screen at the city's Jamsil Baseball Stadium. Instead, give them the real thing like last night's classic Classic final from Los Angeles.

Why not reward Tokyo or Seoul or Caracas with the host role for the next edition of the WBC? They deserve it.

And why should Bud Selig be left as a de facto head of the WBC? Spread the honor and share it with the commissioner of Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan, or with the head of the Dominican Winter Baseball League.

The only pie baseball is as American as these days is humble.

Kevin B. Blackistone is a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, and a frequent sports opinionist on other outlets. A former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News, he currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.