World Baseball Classic Bracket Set

Major League Baseball has set the bracket for the World Baseball Classic. Pool A will play in Japan; the nationalist subplots will run rampant as Taiwan, China, Japan, and Korea all play their old wartime enemies and uneasy neighbors. In Pool B, South Africa will join the NAFTA members in a group the USA and Mexico should easily headline. Pool C will be hosted by Puerto Rico, and include Panama, Cuba, and the Netherlands. In Pool D, also held in the U.S., the runaway favorites will beat up on Venezuela, Italy, and Australia. The question is not whether the Dominicans will make the finals, but whether they will score less than 15 runs in any game. A-Rod, Tejada, Manny, Pujols, Papi, Sammy, Vlad, Aramis, Pedro, anyone?

The other early favorites have to be the U.S., with all that pitching talent, and Cuba, which will play as a cohesive team and want to make the most of this opportunity to show up the free world. The only other real national team will be the Chinese, and their main goal will be to look respectable losing to Taiwan and Japan; after that, they'll just root for their Cuban comrades.

The Classic not only provides a forum for post-colonial and post-Cold War revenge, its also a chance to learn about other baseball-playing lands for American fans and journalists, such MLB staffer Barry Broom, who wrote that Cuba is a "tiny coummunist [sic] island 90 miles south of Miami Beach" or that Andruw Jones is from "Holland" (he's from Curacao, one of the Netherlands Antilles). Some American-born players want to go with their country of ancestry: A-Rod has said he's going to play for the Dominican. Nomaas.org suggests that Giambi should join the Italians.