I would favor the Japanese team here; the US got spanked by Mexico, struggled against Colombia, and had their hands full with Venezuela. But it could go either way. I thought Mexico had Japan beat; you can't go to sleep on them.
It will never be the WC ( although that is the model they looked to when coming up with the tournament ) because the game just doesn't have anywhere near the following of soccer. But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the ride. But really, the game is just too long. 4 hours...who has 4 hours to spare? I'm retired and I don't have that kinda time.....
Doesn't have to be the World Cup to be a fun international competition. Nothing else compares to the World Cup in terms of global popularity. So what? It'll help baseball expand its global reach. Long game times are inevitable. Frankly, I enjoy the feeling of watching an event without a clock. Perhaps they will change in future, but I wouldn't count on it. Baseball just isn't going to be a game played in 90 minutes unless they make games 3-4 innings long. It is what it is.
Japan has better pitching than the US. The US lineup is better, but the two teams are closer in offense than pitching. But it's baseball. The US could come out and put up a 12 spot with this lineup.
They've instituted a pitch clock in MLB; the game times there are getting down to 2.5 hours because of it. It will be interested to see if the WBC adopts it -- I don't know if other leagues will add it. The next next for the WBC is to find a way to do this with more major league pitching even with pitch limits. It's not quite as fun with the staffs as they are.
The advantage the world cup has is that most countries on the planet are mad about football and they have been for a very long time. Baseball will need to grow its game domestically on the international stage and then the popularity of a world tournament will follow.
It shouldnot be about the boosting of the popularity, which it isnot, but about being challenged as a country and as players by the best in the world.
Of course its about popularity? If baseball wants to have a world cup as 'big' as the football, rugby or cricket World Cups it obviously needs populations of people that are interested in it no?
Uhm, who says that's the aim? It started and still is a meeting of the world's best baseball countries to compete with each other. Nothing more, there's also no press campaign to focus attention etc. on it. That's the beuaty of it that among the best paid sporters in the world this happens, a test of strengths without big coffins of money involved.
There's always coffins of money involved. MLB runs the WBC, I think, in part to make MLB more popular worldwide. Such is our world. That said, I think this WBC has shown that in quite a few countries baseball is that level of insanity. There's two things to make it better. The biggest one is to better engage Americans. The casual baseball fan didn't come in super engaged. I think this WBC will start to change that but I also think you need to solve the pitcher problem. When someone beats the US without this excuse ... and it will happen, because small sample size theater and limited rosters, etc. -- we will see stronger engagement. Stop the season for it or whatever, to get the eyes on it. The second one is to grow the sport in a few more countries. I think people are surprised at the width or quality play, but if some of these places where it is practically an amateur sport -- like Australia -- were to grow a bit more, I think it would round it out. It's never going to be soccer, but that doesn't matter. It's already super fun with Japan, Korea, Central America and the Caribbean as really serious players. But I'd love to see a few more.
You can't without reducing the innings or completely eliminating breaks between innings. Which is fine. Part of baseball is the indeterminate atmosphere, the rambling of it. It had just gotten a bit too bogged down in pitching changes and stepping out of the box.
They did something to limit the time for cricket matches, but I've no idea what. @Crawleybus for sure can enlighten us. Those long cricket matches you couldnot survive without a properly stuffed picknic basket
In 2017 the US team lost twice in earlier rounds. Once to the Dominican Republic, once to Puerto Rico. They would then win the rematches, including beating Puerto Rico in the title game. They even beat Japan 2-1 in the semifinals along the way. I like our chances with this hitting lineup. Hopefully the pitching can turn it up a notch or three.
The WBC is really long because of high scores, lots of pitching changes and ads. And no pitch clock. Like I said, MLB has instituted a pitch clock now. So they are shortening it. But to get to 2 hours from the 2:30 or 2:40 it is now... It's a half hour of between inning times if you give them 2 minutes. That's ad time, but even if you got away from the economics, you probably couldn't save more than 8 to 10 minutes. Even if a pitcher faces the minimum number of batters ... that's like a minute and a half per batter. No pitching changes, no hits, no runs, no nothing. It's just really hard to go that fast -- even then, at 15 seconds a pitch, you're looking at over an hour (then plus 30 minutes for in between innings). It's impossible for 9 innings even if you shorten the time in. Oh, a game might do it but not on average. So basically, you have to cut innings. That's it.
The Japanese pitching is better than the American pitching. Pitching wins championships. If we had our best pitchers at the event, then yes. LIke Scherzer, Verlander, DeGrom, Nola, Wheeler, blah, blah, blah. But we have a good guy going tonight so we'll see what happens. Kind of a toss-up. That American lineup is killer, so maybe the US wins a high scoring game. I love some of the USMNTers giving a shout out to the baseball team, and wishing them luck today. BRING IT HOME, BOYS! 🇺🇸Good luck tonight, @USABaseball! We’re root, root, rooting for the home team ⚾️ pic.twitter.com/vy9Kdiusbz— U.S. Soccer Men's National Team (@USMNT) March 21, 2023
Recent years have been 3:05-3:10 on average. They new rules are trying to scale it back to 2:45-ish as it was 20 years ago. Nobody's really looking for it to be two hours.
Pretty cool ending with Ohtani vs. Trout. Very fun and gaining traction for sure. Alas, the US has to get better pitchers to come if it's gonna really take off... Merrill Kelley, Aaron Loup, Kyle Freeland.....I mean, these guys are basically the definition of "journeyman".
Of course what ended up happening was something of a pitching duel, which we lost. That probably wasn't the most likely outcome, but that's baseball. The one silver lining to this is that we lost to a country that absolutely loves both soccer AND baseball, which is basically a good thing.