Home International baseball More WBC 2009 details announced

More WBC 2009 details announced

by Matt Smith

The World Baseball Classic 2009 tournament was officially launched at a press conference staged in Tokyo yesterday.

With Japan being the reigning champions and the Tokyo Dome set to stage the MLB season opener between the A’s and the Red Sox tomorrow, it was a fitting place to announce details relating to the first round of the competition that is a key part of MLB’s globalization plans.

It says a lot about the success of the inaugural staging of the event in 2006 that the news has predominantly been met by only positive comments. It’s human nature for a new event to be looked at with a certain amount of trepidation, but the outright hostility towards the competition from some quarters within the U.S. was quite shocking. Thankfully, many sceptics were won over and while some logistical problems are still there in the background (not least the inevitable disruption the WBC will cause to the pre-season preparations of MLB teams), there now appears to be much more good will towards the tournament.

There are plenty of details still to be announced in regards to the format and venues for the later rounds, but the plans for the first round show that the organizers are determined to build on the foundations laid in 2006.

There will be at least two new host nations in 2009, with the Rogers Centre in Toronto and Foro Sol Stadium in Mexico City both staging one of the first round pools. The Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan, Puerto Rico and the Tokyo Dome will host the other two pools, reprising their roles from the 2006 event. Arizona and Orlando have been dropped from the event and in truth it seemed as though the two Spring Training bases were only used last time for the sake of convenience.

I’ve stated that there will be “at least” two new host nations because this announcement does leave one issue up in the air. The President of the Dominican League, Leonardo Matos Berrido, had previously stated that the Dominican Republic would withdraw from the tournament if they were not chosen to be one of the hosts. It’s possible that they may have been given one of the two Round two pools, although more likely this threat was simply shrugged off by the tournament organizers. The WBC would be much the poorer without a Dominican Republic side in it, so you would hope that a compromise has been reached. Certainly David Ortiz’s supportive comments at the press conference yesterday seem to suggest that the players believe the baseball-mad country will be represented at the event once again.

The other stated change is in relation to the so-called ‘advancement rules’.

The basic tournament format will be the same as that used in 2006. The first round contains four groups of four teams, with two teams from each going forward into round two. This second round will involve two groups of four teams, with two from each making the semi-finals and the winners heading to the grand final. The semis and the final will be one-off, ‘winner takes all’ affairs.

However, the round-robin format has been scrapped, apparently “to avoid the kind of convoluted tiebreaking procedures the World Baseball Classic rules committee instituted for the inaugural 2006 tournament”. These are the same tiebreaking procedures laid out in the IBAF’s rules and used in other international tournaments, so I’m not sure why they are such a big issue. Their alternative method hasn’t been explained particularly well in the press release, but in essence the idea is that as soon as two teams have lost two games, the other two teams in the group will advance.

During the previous tournament, I highlighted the brackets as something that could be improved upon and they’ve partly addressed this through the introduction of “cross-over Semi-Final games”. This means that the winner of Pool A faces the runner-up of Pool B etc rather than the top two in Pool A facing each other again. Quite why they didn’t work it that way in the first place is still a mystery to me. In 2006, we had the strange situation whereby Japan and Korea faced each other in the first round, the second round and the semi-final and it still looks as though they would play each other in both of the first two rounds (if they both get through round one).

Personally, I would prefer a slightly different structure, which I’ll explain later in the week. Still, the ’09 plans do sound like an improvement all the same and it’s difficult not to be excited about the event. Quite a few Major Leaguers ducked out in ’06 and were quickly regretting their decision when they saw what a great experience it turned out to be for all of those who took part. With the hope that even more of the top players will be representing their countries, it should be quite a spectacle.

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