Monday's World Baseball Classic final was just that: a classic final.
It featured great pitching, timely hitting, some spectacular defense, and a passionate, vocal crowd of 54,846 at Dodger Stadium. So much excitement they needed 10 innings to pack it all in.
In fact, about the only thing separating it from a major league playoff game was, well, teams made up of major league players.
The Seattle Mariners' Ichiro Suzuki, who delivered the game-winning two-run single in the 10th, was one of only three big-leaguers Japan used in its 5-3 win over South Korea. And the losers had only one major league player on their roster.
Three years ago, Japan won the first WBC with two big leaguers and last summer South Korea won an Olympic gold medal with none.
Which raises a question for all the big league teams that have seen their stars lose to South Korea and Japan: If you can't beat them, why don't you let them join you?
"I think just about everybody here could probably play in the big leagues," Davey Johnson, a former All-Star player and World Series manager, said before his U.S. team -- featuring 28 major leaguers -- lost to Japan in the WBC semifinals. "Fundamentally, I don't think anybody plays the game as well or practices as hard as the Japanese."
Added Venezuelan Manager Luis Sojo, a member of five World Series winners, after his team lost its WBC semifinal to South Korea: "Surprises me that there aren't that many Koreans in the big leagues. But I think from now on, there will be."
Japan, which had 16 players on opening-day major league rosters last spring, is a known producer of world-class talent, though complicated and expensive rules put in place by Japan's domestic leagues make it difficult for U.S. teams to access that talent.
South Korea, meanwhile, with an eight-team professional league that is younger than half the players on its national team, remains largely overlooked. Despite two Olympic medals in three tries, second-place finishes in the 2005 World Cup and 2002 Intercontinental Cup and a third-place finish in the first WBC, the country has sent only 12 players to the majors, four of whom played in the big leagues last season.
That, promised one National League scout who has followed South Korea throughout the WBC, is about to change.
"I've been surprised. I think a lot of people have," said the scout, whose team forbids him from speaking on the record. "Maybe I was just ignorant. I was ignorant. If you don't think some of these Koreans can play in the big leagues, then that's prejudice."
