The story of baseball in America has always been intimately tied to the story of communications technology. The game began to explode into the national consciousness soon after the 1886 invention of the linotype, which – by enabling operators to rapidly set printing plates – gave rise to the mass circulation newspaper. Radio brought the game into homes and factories. Highways and modern irrigation, which encouraged the great population movement toward the Pacific, forced baseball to expand past St. Louis, which had been its western frontier for nearly a century.

In none of these cases did baseball manage its response to new technologies; each time, it reacted to events, rather than shaping them. But such has not been the case with the Internet generally, and broadband more specifically.

Baseball has shown great prescience with regards to these technologies, investing enormous sums in setting up the infrastructure to exploit them and setting up protocols to divide the revenues they generate. Today one can watch or listen to any major league game with a reasonably fast Internet connection, and the MLB Web site is positioned to become the main broadcaster and official statistics bureau for the minor leagues. These are just early developments. Widespread access to broadband will completely change the way the game is watched, while altering many of its basic business structures. Among other things, at some point in the near future it will render television revenues anachronistic and irrelevant.

This is one part of the context that informs next March’s World Baseball Classic, a 16-nation tournament meant to serve as the game’s World Cup. Broadband provides a means of delivering that product, but without a market for that product it isn’t very important. That brings us to a second development to keep in mind – the changing nature of the American city.

As exurbs draw a larger and larger percentage of the population, and as cities become more and more stratified, moving towards the Bloombergian vision of a “luxury product” inhabited mainly by the very rich and very poor, they will not support the further expansion of Major League Baseball and may not support it in its present state. Places like New York, Chicago, and Houston will have enough wealthy people to whom baseball can be marketed as luxury entertainment, but that’s not true everywhere.

As is, markets like Kansas City and Tampa Bay are probably not capable of supporting healthy major league teams, nor are potential host cities like Portland or Las Vegas. Middle-class flight from urban areas would drain cities of that part of the population that has traditionally done the most to support baseball, and possibly make some presently viable cities such as Milwaukee unviable.

The World Baseball Classic is, in the broadest sense, a reaction to these social forces, a bold idea to promote baseball all around the world. Its most immediate appeal is, of course, the idea of teams playing for national pride and for the chance to show their superiority over the Americans, and this alone makes it a wonderful idea. In the long term, there might not be much better for baseball than Japan or Cuba or the Dominican Republic beating the United States in the finals. At a time when America is not particularly popular abroad, this would go a long way toward showing that baseball is of truly universal appeal, and not merely an idiosyncratic and largely incomprehensible American diversion.

Far more important than this, though, is the opportunity the World Baseball Classic provides to market baseball to audiences who may never have given it a thought before. The field of 16 includes not only baseball-mad America, Japan, the D.R., and Puerto Rico, after all. It also includes Italy, the Netherlands, and – most crucially – China.

I wouldn’t suggest that a China-Taiwan game is going to make everyone in China run to the nearest shop with fists full of cash demanding Albert Pujols jerseys, but there’s no reason to think it will do anything but heighten interest in the game. As such it will help lay the groundwork for the eventual marketing of MLB in China, especially among children who will grow up to watch and play the game.

That is the real prize: a growing audience for MLB abroad. Japanese fans now bring in significant revenue for Hideki Matsui’s Yankees and Ichiro’s Suzuki’s Mariners, but the Japanese market has barely begun to be exploited. It will be, and must be, because of the forces that are coming together to shrink MLB’s potential markets here. Baseball need not become the national game of China for tens of millions of people to become fans; given the rapid spread of broadband, MLB can deliver its product to this niche audience cheaply and without a middleman cutting in on the profits. This will only grow more lucrative as the distinction between televisions and personal computers becomes increasingly blurred and ultimately irrelevant.

There are a great many things for which one can criticize the lords of baseball – for starters, their refusal to include Montreal among the international markets they desire – but as a mechanism for promoting the game and positioning baseball to change in response to its times, the World Baseball Classic is a brilliant idea.