Baseball Tradition Is In Jeopardy

With the institution of the world baseball classic, a political ploy, the tradition of pre spring, and early spring emergence of new seasons has been altered, and not for the better.

Clearly one gets a sense of distraction and disunity in the baseball world. It's no longer the assembly of teams in training camp, but more now like a migration season for those who fall into this political tampering spectacle. This migration or change will no doubt terribly affect these players' performances and team spirit in the upcoming baseball season, as well as in seasons to come.

The fact is that a sense of team, that sense of pride for the club the players represent, the sense of competitiveness and duty for the team which hires them, will become absent, and instead, baseball will evolve more into a "pork barrel" agenda, swayed and influenced soley on self interests, both, by the specific diplomats of countries represented in the world baseball classic, and by each player's agent, as they are manipulated by politics as well as manipulate players themselves more and more, for their own benefit, using both the political and their own motives in which to better serve their clients but mostly themselves. How's that for a sentence? Gosh gee whiz, I gotta learn to shorten my sentences. Not to mention try and make more sense of this baseball spectacle which is going to screw up all of the traditions and valuable impacts which major league baseball has had on americans for over a century.

Spring training has changed. It will no longer be an assembly of rosters, and invitees, in which to warmup and work out the winter kinks, and get ready for a long season of fans, hotdogs, apple pie, and pennant races, and world championships. It will become pre-spring training, in which teams won't be unified until the start of the season, and chemistry and team unity won't be realized perhaps until the season is lost. They can't warm-up and share their duel hopes and aspirations for the upcoming season, but they'll find themselves searching more for what those aspirations would have been had they been left alone and allowed to report to spring training without this terrible and destructive interruption.

Keep politics out of baseball! If I error in baseball's agenda please comment below and let me know what I'm missing, or where I'm missing in terms of how baseball tradition is affected by this major disturbance to our pre spring training blues.

Mark C. - (Baseball Etc.)

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