On internet message boards where fans went to post their rants and praise, one distraught fan asked how come baseball doesn't have it's own world cup, to which someone replied that baseball's World Cup is called the World Series.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Baseball has a World Cup, but since no country but Cuba sends its best players, few baseball fans even know about it and baseball has no real world championship, despite what some Americans might tell you.
A World Series championship is to major league baseball what a league championship is to the top-tier teams in any country with a professional league. The New York Yankees have as much claim to the title of World Champions as English premier league champion Arsenal.
Both Major League Baseball and the Premiership represent the top professional competition in the countries where baseball and soccer, respectively, originated. You don't hear anyone calling the Gunners world champs, because they're not--and neither are the Yankees. But that doesn't mean baseball, basketball and football fans in the U.S. will change what they call their winning teams.
The claim of world champion sounded less hollow in 1884, when the first World Series was played between the National League champion Providence Greys and their American Association counterparts, the New York Metropolitans. The only established baseball at that time was in the United States and Canada, and the idea of international sports and national teams was still in the gestation stage.
That was an era of rampant imperialistic bombast, but we Americans still call our champions world champs. We do this partly out of habit, partly out of ignorance, and partly because bombast, like baseball, is as American as apple pie.
But while the rest of the world has gotten smaller and more integrated, most major league owners continue to live in the 19th century.
As the world changes and sports marketing becomes increasingly global, baseball leagues, like the top soccer leagues, can make money from selling their televised product around the world--but only if there is someone who wants to pay to watch. Organizing meaningful international competition is the way to build that interest.
In its 72-year history, soccer's World Cup has gone from a novelty to the biggest sporting competion in the world. The allure of the World Cup has been a strong ingredient in the development of soccer interest in Japan. That interest has supported increasing spending to watch European teams on television.
But there is no similar event generating interest in baseball in countries where it is less established. Unlike soccer, where the international federation owns the lucrative rights to the World Cup, baseball's ruling body has nothing with which to encourage pro owners to act in the best interest of the sport as a whole.
It is up to the owners to take action.
Pro baseball players could be made available for international duty a few weeks a year in order to hold qualifying tournaments and finals. It would be a new idea and would need time, and that's an enormous obstacle to overcome.
Major league owners are typically incapable of any sort of long-term planning when it comes to running their teams so asking them to invest in the long term future of pro baseball will be a tough sell.
You could explain to them how big soccer's World Cup, although that might require explaining what soccer is, not to mention a lesson or two in geography: "No the United States is not the center of the universe."
But baseball fans should not give up on the owners. After all, George W. Bush is a former major league owner--and he has reportedly learned the difference that Mexico is not part of Texas and that Canada is not a part of the United States.
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .