You can put me in the same camp as Brent and Jeff in support of the World Baseball Classic. Read their posts for a good rundown of the tournament and the excitement surrounding it.
I just wanted to add that the WBC also delivered on the most important part of international sporting events: beating the commies.
The People’s Republic of China was eliminated after losing all four of its group-stage games, scoring a total of ten runs and allowing 50. South Korea defeated China by a score of 22–2 in only five innings (the tournament had a mercy rule to save pitching). It’s one of the ugliest box scores you’ll ever see.
A very strong Venezuelan team was defeated by the United States in the quarterfinals in a riveting 9–7 game, with Trea Turner hitting a go-ahead grand slam in the eighth inning.
And the United States trounced Cuba 14–2 in the semifinals in Miami. “Chants of ‘Freedom,’ ‘Down with communism,’ and ‘Patria y Vida’ — the title of the song linked to the protests on the island in 2021 — broke out several times during the game,” reported the Miami Herald. The story goes on to say:
The U.S. team “played better and deserved the win, but there was another shameful factor: the pressure from the fascist core of Miami, with provocateurs, with people whose only homeland is money,” Abel Prieto, former Cuba Culture Minister and current head of the cultural institution Casa de las Americas, tweeted Sunday evening.
Ah, yes, the “fascist core of Miami.”
But many Cubans on the island watching the game, broadcast by state television, were ecstatic to see the Cuban leaders so openly questioned, an act punished with prison on the island.
“The dictatorship will not fall with this nor will the political prisoners be released tomorrow,” wrote a Cuban activist who posted anonymously on Twitter for fear of government reprisals. “But even so, I am going to be one of the many millions of Cubans who are going to sleep today dreaming that freedom is not that far away and that if we have anything, it is the support of our exiles.”
The Cuban government was on guard against defections, but bullpen catcher Iván Prieto González was a no-show for the team’s early-morning flight back to Havana. His brother picked him up at the hotel the team was staying at after the semifinal game, the Herald reports. As Jim Geraghty said, “a fantastic free agency pick up for the United States of America.”