This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Japan
The regular baseball season now extends over six full months, the first regular season game is scheduled for April 5, and the last for October 4th. The World Series is not expected to start until October 28th, a full 24 days after the season ends and will almost certainly extend into November again. For those of us for whom there is no such thing as too much baseball, this is a fine arrangement, but seven months of baseball is a lot and does not come without a cost.
The World Cup is an important global event in which the US usually plays a very peripheral role. That was certainly the case this year as the US made it out of their group but lost in the Round of 16. The World Cup inevitably draws contrasts between soccer's global even universal popularity and the American people's stubborn preference for baseball. This is, of course, a false contrast as baseball is popular in much East Asia, the Caribbean and increasingly in a few other countries besides the US. Soccer, while the world's most popular sport, has failed to catch on in many parts of South Asia and is one of several popular sports in Australia, parts of East Asia and North America.
The WBC is far from perfect, with occasionally uneven play and many of the game's best players deciding to concentrate on spring training rather than the tournament, but it is also a lot of fun for many people and an opportunity to highlight one of baseball's biggest accomplishments in recent years. Selig has gotten a lot of things wrong, but should be recognized for getting this one right.
The combination of continued population growth, the rumblings of global climate change and consistently increasing demands for all resources including energy, but also for water and land makes all of us particularly vulnerable to natural disasters like the one we have just witnessed. The tsunami should help demonstrate the import of investing in infrastructure and preparing for contingencies, but even doing these things will not be enough.
This tsunami is also illustrative of the unique position in which the U.S. still finds itself in this increasingly multi-polar world, and a reminder that in some important ways the U.S. remains the world’s only true superpower. One way to see this is that the U.S. is the only country that is going to be heavily involved, financially and otherwise, in addressing the two biggest global developments this year, the tsunami and the rapidly changing the Middle East. China, for example, may play a role in helping Japan, but will not be investing any resources in trying to make a smooth transition in the new Middle East. Several European countries will come to Japan’s assistance, but not to the extent that the U.S. will.
History has shown both that revolutions are rare and not the inevitable outcome of large, even massive street demonstrations, and that when most authoritarian regimes are overthrown, they are not replaced by democracies. Moreover, while some democracies, notably those in countries of Eastern Europe like Poland or the Czech Republic as well as the Baltic states arise out of events that could be described as revolutions, most democracies take a very long time to evolve. The American democratic revolution, for example, lasted roughly two centuries beginning with the American Revolution in 1776 which brought independence, followed a few years later by the creation and approval of the U.S. Constitution, and ending when apartheid in the American south was brought to an end with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965. Some other democracies, Germany and Japan, for example, grew out of military defeat, occupation and enormous commitment of resources from other democratic countries.
China is clearly an economic power which can become the world’s major power if the U.S. continues to make mistakes and if China avoids some major economic, political and environmental crises that are on its own horizon. However, China’s rise to global supremacy is hardly an inevitability and should not be seen as one. For the U.S., therefore, it is important both not to underestimate China’s potential, but also not to overestimate it either. Recent media coverage of China seems to have clearly veered towards the latter mistake.
The Olympic decision seems to have come right as international baseball is approaching a tipping point. In the next few years Major League Baseball will likely become more international as more countries are represented at the Major League level, thus building greater fan bases outside the U.S. and contributing the growth in popularity of the baseball globally, and the WBC specifically. The inner workings of the IOC on questions like this are something of a mystery to me, but they made a mistake this time and placed themselves firmly behind the curve with regards to baseball’s international popularity.
There’s also some truth to this. All countries, particularly from America’s point of view, have some strategic value. The problem with this approach is that if all countries have strategic importance, then no country has strategic importance and all countries are of equal import. Strategic value only has meaning if it is a relative term, and referring to a country as strategically important only means something if it is considered more or less strategic than other countries.