World Baseball Classic Champions

This show is focused on the World Baseball Classic. The World Baseball Classic is a tournament in the vein of the World Cup. Teams from countries around the world compete in a baseball tournament. The tournament takes place during spring training every few years. This year the tournament was shown exclusively on MLB.tv. This may be the reason behind the lack of awareness of the tournament.

Even though baseball is America’s pastime, the United States has never won the World Baseball Classic. Well, that changed this year as the United States is the World Baseball Classic champion. It didn’t look like the United States had a chance in this tournament but the team really didn’t have a weakness. Ian Kinsler came under fire for his comments on the makeup of the United States team. He said something about the United States team not being focused on celebrating as they are there to play baseball. These comments came after one of the teams in the tournament were celebrating throughout their game.

The media shouldn’t call out Kinsler for his comments as it wasn’t that long ago that the media was pushing the NFL to remove celebrations from their games. Now, the same media members are calling sports boring after their original comments pushed celebrations out of sports. It seems to be coming full circle as there are rumors that the NFL is going to add full celebrations back into their games. Baseball could use celebrations, but they also need to speed up the game. It is very hard to watch baseball on television unless you are at a bar or a place to casually watch a game. A World Baseball Classic championship isn’t going to lure new fans to baseball.

Richie Leahey