World Baseball Classic Expands

The WBC is expanding to 28 teams starting in 2012. As a baseball fan, you have to be happy with the chance of baseball thriving world wide. The numbers of kids joining in America has been down of late due to interest in other sports, the rising cost of "Little League" and other circumstances. Maybe this will peak interest and resurrect the game a little bit.

The 12 new nations joining are Israel, Thailand, France, Brazil, Colombia, The Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Philippines, and Spain. There will be a qualifying round in the fall of 2012 with the 12 new teams and the 4 teams that didn't win a game in 2009 (Russia, Taiwan, Canada, Panama.) The winners move on to play for the championship, joining the other nations in the WBC in March of 2013.

As a fan, my only hangup of the WBC is that it takes place before the start of the MLB season. When players are used to preparing in spring training, they instead have to gear up to play in games that mean something and give 100%. There has been issues of injuries and fatigue from the added workload from previous Classics. I hope in the future the games can be played mid season or after the World Series to help prevent injuries.