The Fever Pitch Breaks

After this week's ad hominem attacks, this page is take a break to discuss Canada's performance at the World Baseball Classic. The 9-1 loss to Mexico last night virtually eliminates Canada from the second round, unless South Africa can beat Team USA. Sure, the Americans have recently suffered upsets in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Roger Clemens wasn't pitching for them.

Team Canada, however, did make their presence felt at this tournament by treating fans to the greatest baseball game ever played....in the month of March. While this country has a lot of deeply confused people who don't like baseball, Canada also has a lot of people who just don't like the United States, and easily latch on to any star-spangled comeuppance like the 8-6 victory last Wednesday.

This page, as some of you know, prefers baseball to just about anything, including (gasp!) hockey. Baseball seems to have room for a Carlos Delgado to sit in the clubhouse during 'God Bless America' to protest U.S. military testing in his native Puerto Rico. Baseball seems OK with a David Ortiz snubbing Congress' steroid investigation with a flippant remark like "The only thing I'd test positive for is red beans and rice!" Sports fans have seen what happens in the National Hockey League when someone stops singing from the right-wing Don Cherry songbook: A Ted Lindsay tries to establish a Players Association, and the 'Original Six' owners make like crime bosses to drive him out of the NHL. A Steve Moore insists on legal redress for being assaulted by another player, and all of Hockey turns his back on him.

No, Baseball isn't squeaky clean either. Just ask Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe, Mark McGwire, or anyone who called Jackie Robinson a n***er. Baseball just deals with things out in the open, possibly because the game is played out in the open, when the sun shining on a field of freshly cut grass, and I'm sitting with a frosty cold beer and a sausage hot off the grill, and..........