WBC, IHOP, CYA, SNAFU

Alternate title: Acronyms Are Our Friends.

So the Twins opened up their spring training schedule yesterday with a nice, workmanlike 6-3 victory over the Boston Red Sox. The Twins started their ace, Johan Santana, who got his work in as he prepares for the 2006 season. Nice to see, but now Santana, Carlos Silva, Justin Morneau and various others disappear for 2-3 weeks. Why? Because it's time to play the first World Baseball Classic (WBC), silly!

Before this 16-team contrivance, the acronym WBC was best recognized as one of the alphabet-soup boxing commissions that crown champions based on bribes, er, I mean pugilistic glory. But now WBC stands for a tournament in which countries that don't actually play the sport are entitled to field a team with excess, ethnic sounding Americans. The Italian team is relying on 3rd and 4th generation U.S. citizens, while the Netherlands is using players that sound vaguely Dutch, but may be German. After all, who can tell? The Italian team in particular is amusing - they approached Yankee righthander Mike Mussina to play, since his name seems like it could be Italian. Turns out that Mussina has no identifiable Italian ancestry at all. In sum, the tournament is essentially as international in flavor as the International House of Pancakes is.

So the WBC is silly and harmless, right? Would that it were. While the teams from the Netherlands and Italy are less genuine than the famous Jamaican Bobsled Team, the teams representing two actual baseball hotbeds, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, are fielding strong teams that will likely compete with great ferocity. Santana and Silva will likely be the front line pitchers for Venezuela and this concerns the Twins greatly. While players now train year-round, pitchers rarely cut loose until the end of spring training, so they do not strain their arms. If Santana or Silva were to be injured because of this tournament, the effect would be devastating for the Twins and their chances for success in 2006. Although pitchers are supposed to be on a pitch count in the tournament, do we honestly believe that the Venezuelan coaches wouldn't ask Santana to pitch to just one more batter in order to defend the national glory? And would Santana defy the request?

There's nothing inherently wrong in trying to get a tournament of this sort going, but the time to have it would be after the season. And rather than making it a 16-team tournament and including ringers, it would make more sense to limit the tourney to those places where baseball is actually played (e.g., the U.S., Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, Japan, etc.) If any team suffers a loss that hurts their chances, there will be hell to pay.

Oh, and one last thing -- I wouldn't call anything a "Classic" until such time as it has achieved "Classic" status. This time around it should have been called the World Baseball Tournament, or something like that. That would be more polite than calling it what it really is.