For those of us who live best from April to October, winter can seem as long as it must have for the Germans retreating from Stalingrad. Of course it’s difficult to appreciate the thawing of the ground if the ground hasn’t frozen. European football, for instance, doesn’t really have an off-season, and therefore its return in late August inspires less excitement than it might if the campaign hadn’t ended in June. But each new year, having fasted for four months, I tend to emerge from February unsure of the game the way a good Muslim ends Ramadan skeptical of lunch. Baseball cannot be as good as I remember it.

Spring training usually confirms this. There is little emotion in the early games. It is wonderful to see the score lines return to the bottom bar on ESPN, but the numbers are always irrational—PIT 10, NYY 2—as if in the off-season the leagues got rearranged and the wealth redistributed. If C.C. Sabathia gives up five runs on six hits in two innings of work (as he did on March 11^th), no one applauds, but nor does anyone write his season off. He’s expected to pitch better in his next outing, but the pundits don’t demand that Cashman sell him.

In truth, this measured reintroduction of baseball into daily life, the casual expunging of doubts, may be a necessary facet of a fan’s re-acclimation to the sport. After all, Jordanians break their fast with dates and sweet tea, not with a mound of rice and chicken and bread. To find oneself saddled with the psychological strain of an August division race in March, much less a World Series bid, is the sort of shock that can shut a system down. A season is an elaborate narrative whose characters make up 30 families, each at mortal odds with the others. To get invested in the game, therefore, one must build up a tremendous amount of hate and fear and respect and, yes, love, for the villains—an impossible task, seemingly, to accomplish in 17 days.

Yet this is a rare March, necessitating a hyperbolic exposition of scene. For the second time in history, we’re being asked to attend the hastily staged and short-lived World Baseball Classic, an international tournament spanning fewer than three weeks—a ridiculous pace for our protracted national pastime. The champions and semi-champions of the WBC will play a total of eight games. That amounts to more than a third of a football season, but only four eighty-firsts of a Major League divisional race. On top of that, at least half the cast members are strangers to American scouts, let alone fans. It is not for lack of paying attention that I didn’t recognize, when I saw him in the playbill, the great Dutch leftfielder, Dirk Gijsbertus van ‘t Klooster, who, with the Amsterdam Pirates (more aptly named than Pittsburgh’s, I admit), finished his 2005 season in the Hoofdklasse Honkbal batting .403. Nor, to pick from another band of anonymous Europeans, did I know the tenacious Francisco Cervelli who caught for the Italians, and who was once rated the 23^rd best prospect in the Yankees organization. His September 2008 stint with the gentlemen from the Bronx, and the zero hits he recorded during five at-bats, comprises the entirety of his record in the Majors. But those are the sort of unlikely heroes that make for surprising drama.

When I bought tickets in January for the Classic semis and final at Dodger Stadium, I did so out of an intellectual allegiance to the idea that we need a baseball tournament similar to the FIFA World Cup, where the international stars are briefly national ones. The prospect, though, of competitive baseball in March, as I’ve mentioned, didn’t seem something I could get my heart behind. I hadn’t really paid attention to the first iteration in 2006, perhaps because of a conversation I’d heard on Weekend Edition Saturday between Scott Simon and Ron Rapoport. “Is the World Baseball Classic a good idea to enlist the world’s interest in baseball,” Simon had asked, “or is this just a promotional gimmick?” Rapoport responded, “I think it’s the latter, Scott. You can’t take a time in the season when players are just rounding into shape and…call it a world championship.”

That may or may not be the case. In international football, the Cup is held in summer, after players have rounded out of shape. Those boys carry their season injuries into the mid-year tournament, whereas the baseball players competing this month are still stiff from the hiatus. Both crowds play, therefore, in less than premium form, so physical condition can’t be a valid argument for discrediting the Classic. The valid argument for discrediting this year’s Classic can only be that it was a false prophet in 2006, and that, accordingly, a second coming doesn’t prove an apotheosis anymore than the eruption of Etna made Caesar a god.

If you watched Tuesday’s elimination game between the United States and Puerto Rico, judging by the attendance at Dolphin Stadium you might say that the contest didn’t even qualify as a novelty. There may have been 5,000 people in the stands. The center field bleachers, to a seat, were empty. But, my god, it was October baseball. The US, down by two runs in the bottom of the ninth, loaded the bases. Kevin Youkilis, whom Billy Beane once called the Greek God of Walks, in keeping with his name drew a base on balls. Trailing then by only one run, the next batter, David Wright, hit a looping single off Fernando Cabrera down the right field line that scored the tying and winning runs. The celebration at the plate was nothing less than effusive. The bench cleared, and Wright, after Youkilis had stolen his helmet, ended up face down in the base path covering his ears in the manner of an encierrito who falls before a bull—though his cornadas, if he had any, were from his teammates’ spikes. Baseball, for that moment, was better than I remembered, and my heart was most certainly behind it.

That hit of Wright’s both cemented the United States’ place in the semi-finals, and my faith in the spectacle. I have friends and a girl to see in Los Angeles, and three games to watch from the Dodger Stadium stands. Next month in the “Features” section I’ll report my findings on the evolution of the Classic. I hope to see in the show what Darwin saw in his finches.

By Kaelan Smith