I think some simple planning to get the players who will be involved to have a much shorter off-season, allowing them to come to the WBC is ‘April game’ shape is essential. Having one of your best pitchers (Peavy) not able to control his breaking stuff and pitching like he’s in rehab doesn’t do anyone any good.

I admit I don’t know the timing/scheduling of the Asian leagues, but I don’t see why October isn’t the perfect time to do it. By October all baseball fans in the US who don’t route for NY/Boston/LA are pretty much out of luck, unfortunately. Why not take all of the great players not in the MLB playoffs and run them through the WBC? Split the show times to not interfere too much with the MLB games and we’ve got the best month of baseball the world has ever seen. October Madness. Pitchers are stretched and striding (unless they’ve got a tired arm:)) and hitters are geared up. It also gives all of the great players not on a great team a chance to truly play meaningful games when they are ready and it feels appropriate. Everyone would love it? Why isn’t this happening?

Joe Morgan can interpret an eye twitch to mean the player thought about making the play to second but remembered his High A coach telling him to take the out. He’s ridiculous. for a slower game with more time to fill, the announcers still aren’t as bad as football.

I feel so bad for Jon Miller sometimes. I once heard him call an entire game on the radio by himself. It was fantastic- passionate, knowledgeable, descriptive. Why they think he needs help is beyond me.

Espn was better than usual(I know that’s not saying much) and actually criticized team USA a lot for not having Dunn DH, pinch hitting Longoria because “he really wanted to play” and basically treating it like an all-star type exhibition game while their opponents are doing everything possible to win the game.

However Europe does have a pretty good collection of teams. Germany, France, Spain, Czech Republic and even Russia deserve at least a shot at Italy and the Netherlands, and they would probably all be comfortably better than South Africa.

There are now quite a few European players in the minors (nearly 50, obviously discounting Curacao/Aruba/Antilles guys who aren’t really Dutch) from several countries (yes, even Russia has 2 in the Twins organization… both named Lobanov, even though they’re unrelated) and that number is looking to increase.

In addition to those European teams, I’m pretty confident that Colombia, Nicaragua and a couple more would be able not to embarrass themselves enough to have a viable qualifying phase (throwing Panama back in there possibly). Worst case is 2006 China, and they certainly have come a long way (the South Africans too, and so has Italy… 0 MiLB players during the 2006 WBC, 5 right now), so holding a qualifying phase for minor teams in the off-season surely wouldn’t hurt anybody.

Speaking ESPN, whoever thought it was a good idea to have Joe Morgan, Steve Phillips, and Bud Selig in the booth at one time during a meaningful and exciting game should really never work again. Never. Also, the apologetic comments after Derek Jeter made a mistake was ridiculous. Jeter is a great player, nobody is ever going to argue that, but guys, you don’t have to act like a sycophant towards him.

You should check out this Ombudsman’s column on ESPN, which address that problem at the entire “family of networks” level:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=schreiber_leanne&id=3983722

I hope that link works. If not, you know the drill.