World Baseball Classic? I'm excited!

Finally, a World Cup for baseball. I keep reading and hearing talk of the WBC being stupid and pointless (Mike Downey for the Chicago Tribune, Boers and Bernstein on WSCR 670), but it's stupid and pointless to those that don't get the purpose of it. Baseball is an international sport, and I can't wait to see how the USA's best stack up against the opposition. It will give many stars the opportunity to play on great teams before they go back to the mediocre teams they are stuck on. I love the idea of seeing players representing their nations. I hope that eventually the WBC becomes more important then the regular season, just as the World Cup trumps anything else in soccer. I hope that players will fight for spots instead of being begged to play. What worries me is that most of the stars may not play in the games, they're dropping out like flies. I hope Hideki Matsui gets ridiculed and humiliated for not playing for Japan, I hope Aramis Ramirez lives to regret his decision for dropping out.
Most of all I hope to see hardnosed competitive baseball.

Want to watch the Turino Winter Olympics live in the US? You're out of luck, unless it's hockey you're after. NBC and its stable of cable channels has decided to once again tape delay the Turin Olympics for your enjoyment. For example, ski jumping occured at 12 pm EST on Sunday, but NBC waited a full six hours to show the event. It wasn't preempted by luge or men's downhill or anything else, it was delayed because NBC wants to show the olympics in primetime. They think that they'll increase ratings this way. What they do is confuse the hell out of the viewer, I missed ski jumping yesterday because I wasn't able to tune into NBC for its full four hour primetime block. NBC doesn't tell you what time a specific event will air, and they intermix events so that you never know what you've missed. Still, I have a solution for those who actually want to see the events LIVE (what a concept!), download the program ppstream and tune into CCTV5. PPstream is a P2P TV streaming program, it is currently limited to channels in Asia, but for the Olympics it does the trick. I was getting 400kb/s constant stream of CCTV5 yesterday, and I got to watch a lot of the events LIVE in the US. Screw you NBC!