Wednesday, March 22, 2006

World Baseball Classic No.1

Finally baseball has a world series that actually includes other countries.

The baseball classic has been a success overall and let me just say that in a way I'm glad that the US didn't take home the trophy. There would have been the usual complaints of how one sided it is and so on. So other teams had a shot, they played well, people in lots of countries were excited, and the next one will surely be even better. And even though I'm American I think we need to lose these things sometimes in order to wake up to the reality of the world out there. Too often we join these things pretty they don't count and get kicked in our half-assed attempts.

A few days ago there was an outcry in japan because of a bad call by a US umpire. Actually it's true the guy made a horrible call. But I think my Japanese friends seem to forget that they lost the game basically though poor playing not because of that guy's call. They all started saying "America is the home of baseball. Why is the referee so bad? It must be discrimination." never mind that there are bad calls in every football world cup, olympics and so on, or that the US team also was the victim of some questionable calls in other games. Even the japanese players were saying some things, bringing the whole cultural thing into it. I think if there were a bad call in the lympics, I'd say "Hmm, that judge is an idiot/ jerk/ biased" but I wouldn't start some nonsense like "people in America believe in fairness so we can't understand why the Belgian judge is unfair. We Americans like fair. It's our culture. " etc etc which is what i was hearing when baseball team japan was on the ropes and losing to korea.

So my japanese associates, after losing to nemesis South Korea twice said "It's not fair we don't have our pro players, like matsui (one guy!) but Korea and America do! And we are a small country. It's not fair."

I still can't understand the reasoning so prevalent in Japan that even though it is much larger than Korea and Cuba, Japan is somehow smaller. Fuzzy logic was perfectd here. Also japan had some of it's best players on the team: matsuzaka, a great young pitcher, ichiro, who is a household name on both sides of the pacific. Not fair?

So a few days later when japan beat Cuba, everybody was deservedly happy. Congratulations on a job well done. I'm happy the even went relatively smoothly and many nations got to take part and have a real shot at the trophy. I think the results speak for the fairness of the games. But a few days after the shouts of unfair, unfair, all my Japanese associates ae laughing and saying "Why didn't America win? You are so big and strong? Why why? Ha ha it's strange you don't win."

Can you imagine the outcries had the US won? Unfair, unfair. You big bully. All I can really say is sometimes no matter what, we simply can't win.

2 Comments:

At 2:30 AM, Blogger Erik said...

As corny as it sounds, I had a lot in common with the US when I was growing up. Namely, smaller kids (and who wasn't smaller than me?) would often attempt to start scuffles or contests with me. If I won, I was a bully or it was only because I was a bigger kid, and that wasn't fair; if I lost, I was a sissy or doomed to be taunted.

I wish I had some point to make about how the real world is much more mature, but I don't.

 
At 11:41 PM, Blogger Kirk Dunkirk said...

thanks bro, I'm glad to hear somebodey reads my blog sometimes.
i have to be careful toh', i dont want it to be a rant.

 

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