Off to a Pretty Good Start

If you were looking for a marquee opening game to generate some buzz for the inaugural World Baseball Classic, Korea versus Chinese Taipei probably wasn’t it.

Not that either team plays bad ball, but neither was among the favorites to be still standing March 20, when a champion is declared in this experiment to add international spice to America’s game.

So it’s doubtful more than a few hard-core fans in North and Latin America stayed awake past midnight Thursday to watch the tape-delayed broadcast of Jae Seo, Byung-Hyun Kim and Chan Ho Park mowing down hitters in a 2-0 Korean win.

In fact, there weren’t too many fans who showed up at Japan’s Tokyo Dome either, a shade more than 5,000, according to a dubious official count for a game that began at 11:30 a.m. Friday.

Too bad. People missed a pretty good ballgame.

Sharp double plays. Good clutch pitching. And a bunch of diving stops by infielders, including a beauty by Korea’s shortstop Jin Man Park on a ball headed up the middle that he turned into a force play at second to snuff Chinese Taipei’s ninth-inning rally.

The Koreans celebrated as if they’d won the American League West.

What they had almost certainly won, by virtue of beating Chinese Taipei, was a trip to the U.S. with one of the two Asian spots in the next round of the Classic. It was the Asian round’s misfortune that its most important game -- bitter rivals Chinese Taipei and Korea playing for the “other” berth alongside powerhouse Japan -- was over before fans had much of a chance to know the Classic was even underway.

That’s the way they drew the slots, organizers said, aware that the early matchup had robbed their opening weekend of suspense.

As it turned out, Japan and Korea advanced to the next round.

But the WBC’s Asian round was marked by smaller-than-hoped-for crowds and bigger-than-hoped-for winning margins. Japan’s hitters crushed Chinese pitching, against both the Jim Lefebvre-managed Chinese national team (an 18-2 final) and Chinese Taipei, as teams from Taiwan are called in international competitions (14-3).

Both times the game was stopped before the full nine innings under the WBC’s early-termination rule.

Japanese fans may have also anticipated blowouts, which could be one reason why there was less than a stampede for the $130 tickets behind home plate or the $104 seats down the baselines for Japan’s games against China.

Even the current political tensions between Tokyo and Beijing weren’t enough to generate high passion in a sport where one team is about a century ahead of the other in development.

But there were moments this weekend that gave a hint of grander horizons if baseball can shuck off the stubborn provincialism that has sneered at, dismissed and tried to interfere with this attempt to acknowledge the sport’s broader base.

For one thing, the players seemed to like the challenge of testing themselves at an elite level. Take the joy in Japanese outfielder Hitoshi Tamura’s face as he came off the fieldafter making a leaping, tumbling catch of a foul liner in the left field corner. His team was up by nine at the time.

While coaches suggested some of their players were still playing their way to full fitness, no one looked to be coasting. Players played hard -- maybe too hard in the case of Dong Joo Kim, the Korean all-star slugger who separated a shoulder diving into first base trying to beat out a ground ball against Chinese Taipei.

“All our players were very motivated,” said Korean pitcher Park, who is a San Diego Padre during the regular season, after he closed the big win out over Chinese Taipei. The victory was particularly sweet for the Koreans, who were bounced from the Athens Olympics by Taiwan in a 5-4, 10th-inning loss during the qualifying tournament.

“Maybe if we’d had our major league pitchers back then, we would have won,” Manager In Sik Kim said.

The fans felt it too.

“These guys are our big rivals,” said David Cheng, who used to play baseball in Taiwan and now sells securities. “It’s like Yankees-Red Sox. We hate each other.”

Cheng was one of about 500 Taiwanese fans who made the trip to Japan, sitting together along the first-base line and pounding out a percussive love for country with green plastic cones.

There were no cheering sections from the Chinese mainland during its game. Lefebvre, a former Dodger, spent much of his time before the Japanese game trying to keep his players from hyperventilating in anticipation.

It might have helped if they hadn’t stayed in the dugout to watch the Japanese hitters at batting practice. But Lefebvre’s aim is to have the Chinese playing at a respectable level by the time they take the field in front of the home crowd at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when baseball will make its final appearance as a medal sport.

For a few dreamy innings, however, the Chinese found themselves in the game. Catcher Wang Wei cleared the wall in right with a two-run homer that tied the game in the fourth, at which point China was out-hitting Japan, four to two. It wouldn’t last. The Japanese hitters got untracked with back-to-back home runs in the fifth, Chinese starter Chen Hao Li lost his courage and the game rapidly slipped out of sight.

“Nobody here can play with these guys,” Tom Lasorda, who was watching the games in his role as the WBC’s ambassador, said of the Japanese team. “But wait till they get to the U.S. and see the Dominicans, the U.S. and the Cubans.”

For the Classic’s supporters in Asia, there is a belief that much memorable ball lies ahead.

“Everybody in Taiwan is excited about this,” Cheng says.

But not everybody in the U.S., he is told. Many American fans don’t see the point of playing these games when their players could be playing exhibition games in their club uniforms.

“Oh,” said Cheng, his voice heavily sarcastic. “I thought that was just Yankees fans.”