Yankees, Cubans no. 1 no more

By Jesus A. Garcia Jr.

BASEBALL is not in my list of top five favorite sports. Nonetheless, I enjoy watching the big tourneys of both these sports on television with rounds of beers, even when I am all alone in my room or in a restaurant. It can make my day if it’s a world tiff and especially if Filipino players in billiards are involved. Of course, I always root for them.

Last Tuesday I was glued again to my chair for four hours as I watched the 2009 World Baseball Classic championship match, the encounter of two Asian powerhouses — Japan and Korea. Japan defended their crown, beating their archenemy, the Beijing Olympic Games champion Korea, 5-3, in extra (10th) inning.

History says British and Irish immigrants brought baseball to North America in the mid-eighteenth century and the first official baseball game in the United States took place on June 19, 1846 in Hoboken, New Jersey.

By the late 19th century, baseball was widely developed and eventually recognized as the national sport of the USA. Professional, amateur and youth level games are very popular in North America, parts of Central and South America, Caribbean and now also parts of East and Southeast Asia.

Survey says it stands as the number 1 sport of the Americans, slightly ahead of American football.

Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds and Japanese Sadaharu Oh to name a few, are I believe the world’s all-time greats baseball players.

History also says that baseball, defined as the bat-and-ball sport, had an unofficial debut in the Summer Games in 1904 and was discontinued after 12 Olympiads. I don’t know why.

But this sport luckily reentered during the 1992 Barcelona Games with Cuba bagging the gold and successfully defended their title four years after at the Atlanta Games, with only amateur players qualified to play.

In the 2000 Sydney Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) finally allowed the pros to play with U.S. capturing the tiara and Cuba recapturing the crown in 2004 in Athens.

Surprisingly, the Asians seized the limelight four years after with Korea bagging the gold in the Beijing Games, which stunned the world, and Japan wresting the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006 by clobbering Cuba, 10-6, and Korea last Tuesday, 5-3.

My questions are: where are the Americans now that developed this sport? And the Cubans that dominated this game?

It seems that they’re no longer number one anymore in this sport. The Asians came, saw and conquered. And this is a sport that the Filipinos could focus on because here ‘height is not might’, unlike in basketball and volleyball. That’s what my fellow sports-minded good friend Johnny Valencia observed.

Amen.

* * * *

I had a brief chitchat with 2nd Engineering District czar Engr. Rodolfo Dion at his office in Lingayen last Monday and confirmed the report that a portion of Arellano St. in Dagupan City starting at the junction of A.B. Fernandez Ave. up to Nepo Mall will be half closed to traffic beginning March 28 until sometime in June. The plan is to elevate the flood-prone area by about half a meter, particularly the portion across the Region 1 Medical Center.

This affects me because the Padyak Pinoy bikathon’s fourth leg, which I have been assigned to direct, will be passing that road on May 11. That race is a 75-km. team-time-trial stage up to San Fernando, La Union

So now I have to divert the route and use the Jose de Venecia, Sr. Boulevard Extension.

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