A WBC League (a whimsy)

Several years ago, I put together a custom OOTP baseball league file that was loosely based on the World Baseball Classic.  As I remember, it was a 28-team system (WBC teams, plus a bunch of others I added for fun), two leagues, 3 divisions each, and each team represented a different country.  It was awesome--custom team names, unis, logos, etc.  I think the file has probably vanished into the ether by now...

Anyway, with the news that the 3rd WBC has been expanded to 28 teams, I thought it would be fun to run through the exercise again.

The list of countries can be found in this post...it's a difficult task to make it work.  The main reason is that the teams divide pretty obviously into three major geographic groups: Western Hemisphere (11), Eastern Asia/Australia (8), and Europe/West Asia/Africa (9).  That invites the creation of three separate leagues, with occasional interleague play to keep things interesting outside of the playoffs.

Unfortunately, odd-numbered leagues don't work well scheduling-wise, so I opted to move South Africa from the Europe group over to the Western group.  This is justifiable: South Africa is roughly the same distance from Israel (closest in "Europe" group) as it is to Brazil (closest in Western group).  Unfortunately, the most distant flight will be 1000 miles greater for South Africa under this system.  Sorry, South Africa!  If they opt to withdraw from the league, they would probably either invite a new Western country or just add a second USA team.

So, that gives us three leagues with two to three divisions of 4 teams each.  Here's the layout:

Eastern League	Imperial League	Colonial League
Pacific Division Australia New Zealand Philippines Chinese Taipei	Eastern Division Czech Republic Germany Israel Netherlands	Caribbean Division Cuba Dominican Republic Panama Puerto Rico
Asian Division China Japan Korea Thailand	Western Division France Great Britain Italy Spain	Northern Division Canada Mexico Nicaragua USA
		Southern Division Brazil Colombia Venezuela South Africa

Here are the divisions visually:

Team Composition and Finances

• To keep the nationalistic flavor of the league intact, teams would be required to have at least 5 players from the home country on the 25-man team roster.  The other 20 could be from anywhere (still want very high quality of play).
• Eligibility for home country would follow rules similar to that used in the WBC (i.e. very permissive, but there has to be some legitimate claim).
• Allowances for temporary drops below this number would be permitted in cases of injury.
• Substantial revenue sharing would exist to subsidize the budgets of poorer teams.
• TV contracts would be run entirely by the governing body of the league, and profits would be distributed equitably across teams.
• The league would subsidize 10% of a player's salary when he signs with a home-country team.  If the TV contracts don't cover this, teams would need to pay into a revenue sharing system.

In-Season Play

• Teams would compete within their own league, with an unbalanced schedule favoring division rivals.  
• Because of the difficulty of travel, teams would face off in five-game series (Wed through Sun) throughout the season.  There would be two days off permitted between each series to allow for travel/acclimation.
• The basic schedule guidelines would be:
• 60 games within division (two rounds of 5 games home and 5 games away with each of the three teams within the division)
• 60 games outside of division (six rounds of 5 games home and 5 games away, spread across 4-8 teams)
• 20 games outside of league (two rounds of 5 games home and 5 games away, spread across three teams)
• This gives us 140 games across 28 weeks.  That spans roughly 6.5 months, and so would be a tad longer than MLB's season (although with 22 fewer games because of the off-days).
• The season would run from ~July through mid-January.  Teams in temperate countries, or countries with substantial wet/dry seasons, would need to play the majority of their home games when the whether is appropriate unless they build climate-controlled, covered stadiums (retractable roofs would be mandatory, of course).

Playoff Structure

• Each division winner would be guaranteed a playoff slot.  That gives us 7 playoff teams for a traditional three-stage playoffs.  
• The eighth team would be chosen from four wild card teams (based on best overall records of non-division winners), who would compete in a College World Series-style, two-losses-and-you're-out tournament in a single location (would rotate around the three leagues each year).  
• The remaining playoffs would be typical best-of-7 series, again with two days off in between each game for travel.

Some notes & implications

• Pitching rotations would be interesting.  I suspect that many teams would attempt to throw their ace starter in the first game and then on short rest in the 5th game during important series.  This could be done every third series to give the starter (alternately) three days rest, four days rest, and seven days rest.
• Because the season is shorter, it would take a bit less skill to win a division than in MLB.  That said, the talent disparities may be greater among teams than in MLB because of the 5 home country player requirement.  I would expect better teams to win more often than not.
• Some divisions will feature lower levels of competition than others.  The Northern, Carribean, and Asian Divisions should be very competitive.  The Imperial League divisions will probably be less so.

Musings on the World Baseball Classic Expansion

The World Baseball Classic is apparently expanding from 16 to 28 teams.  The wrinkle is that those 12 new teams, plus four of the mainstay countries in the last tournament, will compete in a "play-in" round during Fall 2012.  Four teams will emerge from this round to enter the main tournament in Spring 2013.

So, the teams guaranteed a spot in the Spring 2013 tournament are:
Australia
China
Cuba
Dominican Republic
Italy
Japan
Korea
Mexico
Netherlands
Puerto Rico
United States
Venezuela

They'll be joined by four of:
Canada*
Chinese Taipei*
Panama*
South Africa*
France
Spain
Great Britain
Germany
New Zealand
Colombia
Nicaragua
Brazil
Izrael
Thailand
Czech Republic
Phillipines
* = played in 2009 WBC

The "play-in" teams will be divided into four pools.  I don't know how that is going to work, but here's a guess, simply based on time zone geography:

Americas Brazil Colombia Panama* Nicaragua	Eastern Europe Czech Republic Germany Israel South Africa*
Eastern Asia Chinese Taipei* New Zealand Philippines Thailand	Western Europe Canada* France Great Britain Spain

Obviously the regional names are poorly chosen, as there are countries that don't fit.  But it helped me keep track of things to use a geographic name.  The biggest oddball is Canada, but I unfortunately don't see a way to put it in the "Americas" group with all of those countries being so close to one another.  Aside from that, it makes a lot of sense, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the WBC follow this very scenario.  It also has the advantage of having one "incumbent" team in each group.  Without knowing a lot about international baseball, I'd guess that they also would represent the putative favorites in each pool--although South Africa would seem to be the weakest of the bunch.  There was a small league (for a year) in Israel, and I'm pretty sure that Germany has some kind of semi-pro baseball league.

Anyway, I don't know how this will all shake out, but I enjoy thinking about stuff like this.

Japan wins again

Kudos to Japan for a fairly improbable (due to sample size, alone) repeat of the Classic.

So how good is the Japanese league? As Patriot points out, it's good, but the proof of how good is in the larger sample: MLB is clearly superior. Of course, MLB is the cream of the crop from (increasingly) all over the world. I'd still take team USA in a do-over, as it was stocked with high caliber MLB talent at every position. But Japan's clearly no slouch team either. I'm sure we'll continue to see more and more Japanese players heading directly to the states rather than working their way over via the NPB.

So, time for the final reckoning on the 'ole bracket. It's not pretty.Oh well! I did successfully "predict" (guess) the semifinal game between the USA and Japan, even if the path I took to get there wasn't correct. I'd tally it up if anyone else cared, but given the interest my other WBC posts have gotten (zero), it's probably not worth it.

I do wonder a bit whether Japan's repeat actually hurts the WBC. They clearly will be the team to beat in four years, no matter who is on the team (and Ichiro, perhaps, may not be). But if the WBC starts to get the reputation as "their" tournament, I can't help but wonder if the interest of other countries may start to fade a bit. And somehow, a second victory for a team featuring so few MLB players just seems to further emphasize that it is a small sample size crapshoot. I knew that before, of course, but now it's bugging me a little bit more than it used to. Maybe I'm just a sore loser.

That all said, this year's WBC was vastly better than the last one. The double-elimination format might be confusing at times, but it's so much more BASEBALL than the ridiculous round-robin + tiebreakers we saw in '06. And while Team USA ran into some major defensive breakdowns, not to mention injuries, it seemed like the guys on that team really played hard. And usually, they were managed to win. That made everything--even the defensive implosions we saw late in the tournament from team USA--a lot easier to take.

I'll leave you with a fun fact: my first daughter was born just a few months after the first WBC. And my second daughter will be born just a few months after this year's tournament. :)

My brackets after round 1

So the first round of the '09 WBC had its share of upsets, the Netherlands advancing to the second round obviously being the largest. How's my bracket holding up?

For each game played, I put a green box around it if I guessed the winner correctly (regardless of who the loser was), and a red box around it if I guessed wrong. And the results?
Not so good. :) That's 10 correct, 13 wrong. I can't count the first games in the Asian bracket because I posted this after those games started...but that's how I would have picked them, so maybe I can cheat and say I was 12-13? Oh, all right, nevermind.

Dominican is killing me, as I picked them to go all the way. And I was probably foolish to choose Canada over the USA in the first game of that bracket, but you gotta choose an upset now and then (right?) and I was hoping it would be Votto's team that did it.

What's amazing to me is that as bad as that went, the fact that the US lost to Venezuela in the seeding game of round 1 means that I actually have three games "correctly" forecasted to kick off round 2! That's the best I could possibly do given that two of the teams I thought would be in round two are no longer with us. I'm thinking we should up-weight round two games a little bit in the scoring. And given that I'm scoring against myself (i.e. no one else submitted a bracket, save Patriot), I don't have a problem with changing the rules mid-way through the tourney! :)

FWIW, my modified picks are that the Netherlands do not win again, and that the US will finish first in pool 2, with the runner up being Puerto Rico. Venezuela loses game 4 and will be out of the tourney. And I'm rooting for team USA the rest of the way, folks!

Update: Jeff Sackman loves the WBC. Bravo!

On the WBC & patriotism

Tango linked to this great article citing comments by Endy Chavez and Yadier Molina on the WBC:

Chavez was beaming after going 3 for 4 to help Venezuela eliminate Italy with a 10-1 victory in the World Baseball Classic. The victory assured Venezuela of a trip to the second round; its game Wednesday against the United States will be for seeding.

The final hero of Game 7, St. Louis Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina, is also playing in the W.B.C., for Puerto Rico. Molina hit a go-ahead two-run double on Monday to beat the Netherlands, and he surprised reporters when he said it meant more to him than the homer that sent the Cardinals to the World Series.

But the revelation did not surprise Chavez.

“It’s not even close,” Chavez said. “When we’re in the majors, it’s our job. We are professionals. You play for your team, but you just try to do your job. Here, it’s something special. You feel like a little kid. It’s not money. No matter who you are, you have to play hard for your country. I think it’s the biggest thing that has happened in my life.”

The biggest thing in his life? Bigger than The Catch?

“That was outstanding in that situation, to make that catch and save the team,” Chavez said. “It’s unbelievable, and it’s a pretty good play. But like I say, representing my country is something special. Nothing compares to that.”

Supports what I was saying the other day about player attitudes and loyalties in MLB and the WBC:

We see the people on our team as "our" heroes, but the truth is that they're employees of a large conglomerate who ultimately are playing for our team because a) that's who drafted them, or b) that's who offered them the best contract. They will have loyalty to their teammates, and over time some may adopt a city as their second home. But I think for most players, their team and "home" city is just the place where they go to work. That's probably especially true for players born outside of the USA.

My perception is that the World Baseball Classic is different. Players are playing for their true home countries (or, at least, the country of their ancestors). My sense is that many of them take real pride in these games and play them with an intensity that is at least on the level of the regular season, if not the postseason.

Anyway, at Tango's blog, a commenter wrote this:

i am phlegmatically pro WBC, because if done correctly it should be a great way to promote the sport around the globe and also provides entertaining baseball at a compitition level above that of a typical exhibition tournament. but i find the whole nationalistic prism it is framed in pretty discouraging. aren’t we above this kind of thing? i know sports nationalism is considered ‘harmless’ and everybody loves the world cup and the olympics and whatever but nationalsim is, to me, pretty much anathema to global progress.
...
nationalism is evil. homerism is just geeky, and when it leads to irrational behavior, yes, sometimes very annoying.

Here's my response:

I love the WBC for many reasons. I love the huge talent differences across clubs, because you get to see teams like the Netherlands pulling massive upsets despite AAA-level (at best) talent. I love that it’s a way to learn more about the personal backgrounds of all the players we follow in MLB. And I love the nationalism of the event.

I completely reject the idea that nationalism (actually, I think patriotism is probably a better word for what we’re seeing) on the level shown in the WBC is evil. The WBC is all about pride in your country. There’s nothing wrong, and a lot right, about that. I wrote when Obama was elected that I felt a genuine since of pride in my country for the first time in a long time. It’s made a tangible difference in my attitude toward team USA this go-around. Maybe that’s shallow, but that’s where I’m at.

I also love to see the patriotism exhibited by the players and fans of other countries. It helps me remember that there is far more to this world than this tiny part of our country where I closet myself. Fans and players of other teams are proud of their own countries, and they should be.

The kind of nationalism we’re seeing in this event is not, or at least does not have to be, the same thing as isolationism or exclusionism. It does not mean that you don’t respect and admire other countries. It just means you’re proud of your own country and the players representing it.

Never really thought I was the patriotic type...but dangit, I am. Maybe I'm not the boot-up-your-ass patriot type, and I'm definitely about as socially liberal as they come...but yeah, I'm a patriot, and I love my WBC.