The World Baseball Classic rolls on today without the Small Red Machine, the Chinese national team, eliminated Sunday by Beijing Olympic champs South Korea. The Seoul Men slapped around China in a 14-0 rout that had to be called after the top of the seventh inning in accordance with the WBC’s “mercy rule.” As an aside, my favorite sports commentator Mike Francesa said it best last night on his show Mike’d Up that this mercy rule is a “complete joke” and it makes what could otherwise feel like an elite international tournament, feel like a softball tournament. That being said, if there was ever a team, or a continent for that matter, that needed a mercy rule, it’s China and the rest of Asia. The first reason is that you have teams like Japan and Korea, two legit baseball powerhouses playing meek squads like China and Taiwan, and the probability that you’ll have a 14-0 game is much higher than, say, in a Braves-Marlins series. But these type of blowouts could occur in any of these Classic games — especially when you have Cuba in the same pool as South Africa or the Dominican Republic in the same pool as the Netherlands. Why the Netherlands is in the tournament could be the subject of another post. The major reason the mercy rule suits the Asian teams is that all of these countries bring a higher standard of “honor” to international play and view blowouts as the ultimate embarrassment. For instance, in one of the bigger political grudge matches of the tournament, China beat Taiwan 4-1 on Saturday. One day earlier, Taiwan was shut out by the Koreans 9-0. Following the two losses, Taiwanese legislators have called for sweeping reform to the island’s baseball program. Likewise, while China doesn’t, and shouldn’t, think of itself as a baseball power, losing to Japan, the object of national hatred, doesn’t sit too well with its sports authorities. But unlike Taiwan, whose leaders openly blast its own team, China’s preferred response to its baseball failures is to pretend the tournament never happened. For instance, the top story Sunday on the online version of the China Daily sports page isn’t China’s elimination from the Classic, but rather Manchester United’s English Cup win. Fine, Man U is huge in China, but even if you click on the section of the sports page marked “World Events” or “China,” there is no mention of the World Baseball Classic anywhere on those pages. And if you search China’s state news agency Xinhua for “baseball,” the only hit for the Classic is a story from March 4 on Cuba’s national team. China is pretending that its dismal performance at the Classic never happened. Rest assured, if China had made it through pool play to the next round of the Classic, we’d know about it. China went winless in the inaugural Classic in 2006 and has since attempted to make strides in the development of players in the mainland. But as can be seen from China’s brief appearance in the Classic, I’m not sure the world has anything to worry about.

Image: Bleacher Report

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