A Modest Baseball Proposal Part 1

The Olympics are coming this summer, and it is currently the world's greatest international celebration that doesn't involve the words "United Nations" and "Toga Party". I like to consider myself a globalist and nothing stirs me up into a frenzy quite like international competition. Every year I get to lose my respective mind for one of the following: Summer and Winter Olympics, World Cup, Rugby World Cup, Ice Hockey World Championships, FIBA World Championships, World Baseball Classic, and will jump on board the Cricket World Cup and the IFAF World Cup the next time they come around. (The IAFA World Cup is a World Cup for American Football. I kid you not. They have been playing it in Japan every 4 years since 1999. Americans didn't even participate until 2007. Ridiculous. Why did this get absolutely no press? ESPN be damned.)

These are all great tournaments, and I am a huge proponent of countries competing with national pride on the line, but I am looking for something bigger. What if we could create a tournament like those international contest, but add more teams to compete, as if we molded an Olympic tournament with the NCAA Basketball tournament, but didn't require everyone to be an amateur. Soccer has two such tournaments, the UEFA Cup and the FIBA World Cup. The former is for European teams only, but the latter is open to every club in the world, (Technically, the top club from each continent and the host country plays in the tournament, but any team from any country can make it to the top of their continent).

I propose that such a tournament be created for baseball.

What? Matt. Stop, listen, and learn, ok. Baseball already has a tournament that showcases all the best teams in the world. It's called the MLB playoffs. We spiced it up when we added the wild card. Ya dig? It's fine the way it is. Baseball is part of American tradition, and tradition means that we don't deviate from the way things are done. I won't have you messin' with my clubs, and potentially injuring my players for some tournament against inferior teams, when the only thing that matters is the World Series!!

Now, I understand that changing anything about baseball would be the rough equivalent to some of setting fire to a Ford Mustang full of American flags and copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, but hear me out. Baseball integrated and all the stadiums weren't destroyed at the same time by earthquakes. Curt Flood brought about free agency and he wasn't immediately struck by lightning thereafter. Baseball went to an 8 team playoff system and lava didn't rain down over all the cities represented in that playoffs, or any playoff since. So don't cry foul over changing baseball, it is merely another evolution, and it just might bring about global support and interest.

The World Baseball Classic was the world's first professional "World Series", if you don't count the 1992 and 1993 World Series that Toronto won. The fact that America didn't win the WBC was the best part. How you ask. Because if America won, nobody would have cared. It would have just been some tournament that we used to showcase ourselves at a game we invented. Big deal. Instead, we got to see Japan, full of great players who could make it in the MLB, that we may never have been able to see play otherwise, play against Cuba, who was full of great players who could 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.

Parties, like real estate and business, are all about location. The tournament would have sixteen teams each playing in one of four cities: Miami, San Diego, New Orleans, and Las Vegas. Vegas and New Orleans don't have big enough stadiums for an international baseball tournament? Well that sure sounds like a great public works project to generate money, (unless New Orleans just converts the Superdome for baseball and Vegas can find a way to play baseball in Sam Boyd Stadium.) Each city throws a party that would be a Mardi Gras - Carnival love child, and cities all over the country get in the mix, throwing smaller, satellite parties for people who cannot make it there. That will bring in the international fans, (and their money), into our economy and get our international mojo flowing. We all win, and while all these international good tidings are going on, the tournament will have its Cinderellas.


Matt, foreign clubs, let alone amateur teams cannot compete with an MLB squad.

Wrong. Well, kind of wrong. In baseball, any team has a chance to win one game. That's why baseball playoffs are played in a series. It gives the better team more of a chance not to be upset in one game. In this tournament, we eliminate the series effect until the end. From round 1 until the Elite 8, the tournament will be set up as a one game playoff. The last four teams will play a three game series to get to the finals, and a three game series to determine the champion. This will give every team a chance, and generate more interest from foreign audiences who don't want to watch their team get slaughtered in a series. On top of that, the winning team will play ten games at the most, minimizing the chances of an injury that will affect them when the MLB season starts. Almost any team can catch lightning in a bottle for 10 games. Imagine a Dutch team upsetting the Cubs, (Cubs fans can imagine it now), an Independent team knocking out the Hanshin Tigers, or an amateur squad from any country becoming the 2006 George Mason of the tournament, and having the world outside the Bronx get behind them when they have to face the New York Yankees. The Nielsen Ratings system would crack, and international attention would be brought to this awesome party of a tournament. The winner would be the real "World Series Champion", and every baseball club owner would go into an epileptic shock just dreaming about the publicity and revenue he could get from that title. That would be enough to convince him to let his players go out there for ten games before spring training.

When it is all over, the casual fan like you or I will be left in a better state than when we started. There will be debates ranging between how the tournament should be changed, (especially if the team we support is upset early), which players from other leagues would we want on our MLB team, (Dice-K from the WBC is the best example of this), and how the game is played with different styles in different areas. We as fans would get a better appreciation for baseball by seeing it played in different styles, and baseball itself would globalize further as other countries decide they want in on this party-tournament action. Really, if baseball can't make the world a better place, perhaps nothing can.

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