A Modest Baseball Proposal Part 1

d make it in the MLB, that we may never have seen play otherwise. The whole tournament was surreal and incredible, and it brought out the best for fans who had never seen the Japanese sacrificial team play, or the play of the Cubans that we had always heard so much about. There we have our Baseball World Cup, but why not expand on that idea.

Baseball is played professionally outside of America and Japan. There are professional leagues in the Netherlands, Italy, Puerto Rico, Israel, Korea, Venezuela, China, and Taiwan. Australia had a league from 1989-1999, and is supposed to be forming a new one at the end of this year. Cuba has a brilliant league but must play as amateurs for their own reasons. Both the Dominican Republic and Mexico have winter leagues. They often feature some major leaguers, (something that would have to be worked out in the case of a club tournament.) Also, there is a high level of interest in both the United Kingdom, (which has about 40 teams in an amateur league, complete with higher and lower divisions, a la their soccer counterparts) and World Baseball Classic countries like South Africa and Panama. America also has more pro leagues than MLB. Independent baseball thrives in America, and there are currently nine leagues showcasing baseball talent that regularly competes at the level of AAA teams, as well as current Florida-based MLB teams.

There are at least 166 independent, professional baseball clubs in the world outside of MLB. (This is where my eyes start to tear up.) What if we took the best of each league, playoff clubs from the world wide professional leagues, as well as Cuba's amateur league, plus the champions of the smaller amateur leagues and American Independent Leagues, and created a 64 team "World Series Tournament"??!!!

The tournament would take place in January, and coincide with........wait for it......a National Party.

Matt, why a National Party?

Believe me, we NEED a National Party. It doesn't take much to see that we as Americans are not only unliked by the rest of the world right now, but we are more than likely in a recession. If the world were a college, then America would be the Pit, from the movie "PCU". The residents of the Pit not only pissed off every group in the school, but also faced serious financial problems nearing the end of the movie. Their solution was, and this makes perfect sense to all college students, to throw the party to end all parties. Afterwards, they had raised enough to keep the house, and everyone liked them again enough to not want to destroy them.

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