USA! USA! USA!

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

Two things I definitely love — baseball and America, and tonight, lovers of both the nation and the national passtime will have a chance to do some root, root, rooting for the home team as Team USA plays against either Japan or Mexico (that game comes on later tonight as I’m typing this up) in the finals of the 2023 World Baseball Classic.

Now, unless you’re a big baseball fan, you might not even know the WBC even exists, and in fact, due to COVID19 there hasn’t been one since 2017, but it’s back and the bragging rights are up for grabs tonight, after more than two dozen teams have spent the past few weeks playing against each other and now the United States has a chance to win for the second straight time.

The Classic is a rarely new idea, coming together after the International Olympic Committe opted to remove both baseball and softball from the Olympics in 2000. In 2006, the first WBC was played with Japan beating Cuba in the Championship Game. Japan won it again in 2009, besting South Korea. The tiny Dominican Republic too the title in 2013 over Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rico came in second

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once again in 2017, when the U.S. finally took home the gold in the sport it invented.

The games have been exciting, featuring a great mix of past, present and future MLB players, all playing for their home nations or, in some cases, their ancestral homes, like Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman opting to play for Team Canada since his grandparents were from Ontario.

It’s a great way to get some cool baseball action a few weeks before the start of the 2023 MLB season and it’ll be fun to see if Team USA can win the big one!