With the final 3 games of the World Baseball Classic moving to Petco Park this weekend, the Globe & Mail’s Jeff Blair highlights the security concerns…but neglects to mention that your heroic editor-for-life will be on hand for the final. Do not fear, people of San Diego. I’ve learned about security from some of the best in the business, and there’s no signature manuever (body disposal, neck elimination, self-chokehold) that I’ve not mastered.
Blair gleans the following quotes from some of the WBC’s pivotal figures ;
U.S. manager Buck Martinez, who will now go back to the role for which he’s best suited — television analyst — might find some of those pregame interviews with players a little harder to come by, after he essentially called out major-leaguers for being pampered and not concentrating enough on fundamentals. “Obviously, you see the value of their practice regimen where they take hundreds of ground balls a day,” Martinez said of the two Asian finalists. “They swing 100 times a day more than we do in North America. I think it is time to say, you know, that that is not a bad thing.”
Stan Javier (above), the general manager of the Dominican Republic who appeared in 1,763 major-league games and collected 1,358 hits, said the elimination of the U.S. team “didn’t mean a thing” about the state of the game in the United States or at the major-league level.
“A lot of players who do well in this tournament wouldn’t last one month in the majors,” said Javier, whose father, Julian, also played in the majors. “I mean, it’s like going hitless for a whole week over the course of a 162-game season. That happened to me as a player.
“When you have a tournament like this where it’s so short? Well, you can’t judge anything by it. It would just be the wrong thing to do.”
Note to my good friends at Major League Baseball : I think Stan The Man has unwittingly supplied you with terrific selling points for future WBC’s.
1) Come see players who couldn’t possibly make it in the big leagues.
2) If they manage to beat the game’s highest paid, most celebrated players, don’t draw any conclusions from it.
3) Just be glad Stan Javier is no longer in uniform.