By 10PM Toronto time, tomorrow night, the World Baseball Classic will officially begin with the game between Cuba and the Netherlands. After six years the world will become a baseball and the world will be baseball. In a spirit of brotherhood and friendly competition, teams representing twenty nations will take to the diamond with the dream of being crowned world champions in the truest sense of the word.
Between the white lines, players will step into a world without war, inflation, disease and the many other ills that afflict the world today. For a period of three hours or so at a time, life will be perfect and that is what sports are about. Our minds can be filled for a little while with more prosaic storylines than the ones we've become so accustomed to, especially over the last three years. For example, we will talk to friends about the Czech team that beat the odds, the ordinary men with day jobs just like you and me who were able to achieve something truly extraordinary through teamwork and years of steady, consistent commitment and passion. We will dance along to the incomparable Taiwanese cheerleaders and mascots and allow ourselves to become children again. We will marvel at how Shohei Ohtani can be two superstars at once both at the plate and on the mound. We will all want to watch the Dominican Dream Team and how far it can go. The greatest player of our generation will don the red, white and blue hoping to bring a trophy home to Uncle Sam.
As we cheer along and stress about our favorite teams rather than our jobs or the bills, we will do so in unison with people from all over the world in perfect harmony and synchronicity. From packed movie theaters in Korea, to sports bars in Los Angeles, there will be cheers, table thumps, songs and suspense as games hit the late innings. From Phoenix in the west, to Tokyo in the east, there will be the crack of the bat, the frenzied shouts of excited announcers that simply speak for all of us, and the armless embrace of complete strangers with whom we have nothing in common except for this sacred game of ours. Without any long winded treatises or sermons, and so often without words, we become reminded of our shared humanity.
Every boy remembers his first ballgame, and the father that took him there. I know I remember mine and the father that took me there. He will be with me when I go back to experiencing the World Baseball Classic live again as he was fourteen years ago when I experienced the World Baseball Classic live for the first time cheering on Team Canada. The world around looks very different from the one of 2009, but baseball remains a constant. It grounds me, it keeps me sane, it comforts me when I need it most, but more importantly, it reminds me of the importance of fun in a world where we often forget to give that to ourselves. Perhaps the leisurely pace of a baseball game is the reminder we all need to take life a little more slowly every once in a while. Just a thought.
Enough philosophizing! Tomorrow we will start hearing “play ball” in many languages spoken to people of many cultures. But all of us will have one language in common. For the next fourteen days or so, we will all speak baseball. Enjoy the 2023 World Baseball Classic my friends!
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