What's So Classic?

Last week I did an entry about the start of the World Baseball Classic. In that blog I asked would the games be good to watch and if the whole thing would be worth it or not.

Well the classic is now in its second week. For the most part the games have been pretty entertaining. The Dominicans beat the Venezuelans to start the whole thing. The Canadians blew out the eighty million dollar US team. Even yesterday there was a little controversy when the US manager argued to get a run taken away from the Japanese team which lead to the US winning by one run.

So what can we take away from the World Baseball Classic so far? The first thing is that Latin America is crazy about baseball and more importantly they are crazy about their countries. In any game featuring a Latin American team, the fans are about as big a story as the major league stars on the team.

The second thing we can take away is that by comparison Americans aren't very patriotic. That is unless, we are getting blown out by our neighbors to the north.

The third and final thing we can take away from the classic is that the American viewing public isn't ready for or they don't want competitive baseball in March. I watched the games on Tuesday and Wednesday but once the college basketball conference tournaments started the classic just became a blurb on Sportscenter. I think the people at ESPN realized this though, considering the fact that if you wanted to watch most of the games you had to be a subscriber to ESPN Deportes.