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sports
Eliminated, with bones to pick but their
heads held high... Will the ball reach the fence? Will Carlos Lee tie it up again? Will he.... But alas, at the end of a thrilling game against the mighty Cubans, it was not to be. With a man on third, two outs and down two runs in extra innings, Lee's shot to left didn't have the distance and that was that for the Panamanian national baseball team. Beaten the previous night 2-1 by the Puerto Ricans and now 8-6 by the Cubans, Panama rallied to tie the game in the bottom of the ninth but when all was said and done was mathematically eliminated from the World Baseball Classic. For a true baseball fan, there are too many games yet to come to dwell on "what if" --- yet. Sure, had a Mariano Rivera in mid- to late-season form been our closer, it might have been different. Had the despicable crook, legislator and taxi syndicate goon Franz Wever not sided with petty swine who called Roberto Kelly "black shit" at a meeting over which Wever presided, we would have had a more experienced manager on the field and it might have been different. Had Major League Baseball, a Japanese team or Wever insisted on papers being handled properly, we could have had the services of José Macías and Fernando Seguignol and it might have been different. If, if, if.... But that's forever a pointless exercise. There does need to be a reckoning, an evaluation of every participant's performance. In such an event, it won't be the players who have to answer for their shortcomings. They lost, but they were great. It's no secret that some of the Major League Baseball owners tried to sabotage this tournament by pressuring their most expensive talent not to play. But let that not detract from the historic realization by most of the owners that baseball is now a world pastime and it's no longer acceptable to try to restrict its highest-level expression to that part of the Western Hemisphere north of the Rio Grande. This needs to be the first of many such tournaments, not the last. They need to happen every few years during an extended mid-season break in June or July, when most of the world's top players are in their best shape. They need to be liberated from the bush-league petty vindictive political games that the Bush administration has played with the Cuban team, and from the likes of Franz Wever. The best thing would be for international baseball to be taken away from the owners and the dignitaries and placed under the players' effective control. That, however, is probably a struggle for another generation. Let us debate these things in earnest after the tournament is over, because meanwhile there is surely much more great baseball to watch. The sad thing is that, after one consolation game with the Netherlands, Panama won't be playing any of it.
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