by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
In my past life I was a baseball stathead. After having an unhealthy appetite for the game, I read Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, and toyed momentarily with the idea of chucking my current life path and instead trying to work in the front office for a ball club. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.
This is a roundabout way of getting to a few thoughts the World Baseball Classic, USA Baseball's answer to FIFA's World Cup. Kos going to root for either Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, just to make it interesting, but on the field the games shouldn't be close. A fully-stocked Team USA, even without Barry Bonds, would be significantly better than the next best team from the Dominican Republic. At Baseball Prospectus (subscription required), Nathan Fox laid out the case for hitters and pitchers. We are the Brazil of baseball, always the favorite and expected to dominate, though as in soccer, anyone can win any given game. Over the course of a full season, Team USA would dominate even against a all-star team that selected major players from the rest of the world. The only real wild cards are the performance of Japan, South Korea, and Cuba, all countries with significant (though generally weaker) domestic baseball leagues.
Elsewhere at BP, Joe Sheehan made the obvious point that the WBC's pitch limits demonstrate the tension caused by baseball's need to bow to MLB's schedule, which keeps pitchers healthy but hampers teams that don't have the talent depth of the United States or the D.R. The World Cup has similar problems, but they aren't resolved through rule changes that drastically change the character of the game. Hopefully, for the sport, the event will rise in importance to a point where the WBC's schedule drives major league baseball, and not the other way around.
Go USA.
