It's not that I'm "not concerned" about Derek Jeter getting hurt. It's that I care more about baseball than I do about the New York Yankees. I'm a Yankees fan, but that's only because I was raised in NY/NJ and they're the team my Dad took me to see as a kid, and having a rooting interest in a particular team makes the game more interesting. It's the game, ultimately, that I care about. If I'm in a minority, then that's the minority I'm in: the people to whom baseball fandom is only partly connected with a favorite team, or perhaps more broadly, the people to whom baseball fandom is only partly connected with Major League Baseball.
The WBC is good for the game, and I'm excited to watch the captain of my favorite team now play on behalf of my country. I
will be sorry if Jeter gets hurt, but not so sorry that I'll regret his participation in the WBC. It's inappropriate for anyone who cares about the sport of baseball in general -- as opposed to just Major League Baseball -- to let worries about injuries to players be a factor. I take a risk of skin cancer every time I step into the sun, and a risk of being in a fatal accident every time I get into a car, but there comes a point when you have to decide how much risk to take in order to make life sufficiently interesting. In that cost-benefit analysis, I rank the fun of a new international baseball tournament above the risk of injury to a handful of players.
If the WBC is a failure, it will be only because the conventional wisdom (or conventional cynicism) never gave it a chance. The reason I don't make much of players getting hurt is that players can get hurt at any time, for any reason, and it's cowardly to let that stop you from pursuing a good idea. Jeter was seriously hurt on Opening Day in Toronto a couple years ago and was out for months. Didn't take a WBC to happen, and he was just as out of commission as he would have been had it happened in a game that "didn't count." (And I reject this "WBC doesn't count" argument, because I reject the proposition that only the 162 games of the MLB season and the playoffs that follow are somehow real, important baseball).
You're right about one thing, wordy:
wordygurdy wrote:
Baseball for the past 100-plus years has been predicated on which team wins the World Series each year. Players, fans and team executives are all geared toward winning the World Series.
It will take a while for the WBC to gain traction. But club soccer has survived the World Cup (and far from trying to avoid service, most players take it as the highest honor to be named to their national teams). The Olympics have a negative effect on the NHL each year, probably, but it's worth it for the thrill of Olympic hockey. There's no reason baseball should be any different -- except that baseball people tend to be a bunch so conservative we could make Newt Gingrich look like Eugene Debs.
It's true that change is involved here: The WBC requires baseball fans, players and owners to adjust to a world in which the MLB season and the World Series are no longer the only things that "count." I concede that this will be a challenge, but I get the impression that you think it's actually a bad thing if that happens.
I don't.