I won’t put lipstick on the pig. The World Baseball Classic is, right now, a catastrophe, a huge missed opportunity, and an embarrassment to Major League Baseball. One can have an avid interest in the tournament – one can even, say, be a professional sportswriter – and still have little idea who’s playing for which team and who’s begged off, which teams are playing against one another, or why any of this is supposed to matter.

The basic objections most often raised to the WBC – that it makes no sense and that no one has really explained why it’s supposed to make sense – are entirely fair and legitimate, as are the concerns held by fans, players, and teams about the effects the tournament might have on pennant races.

Perhaps worst of all, the essential posture of baseball toward those who have raised these objections is that they are backward-looking traditionalists at best, racists at worst. Anyone who dislikes the idea of the WBC, the thinking goes, is against the future, against the marketing of the game to the world.To describe the whole thing as a distasteful and perplexing mixture of vague multiculturalism, wooly internationalism, and cautious, watery jingoism would be harsh, but merited. (Just think about this catchphrase for a second: “They’ll be there for their country, will you be there for yours?” If “being there for my country” is supposed to involve rooting for Roger Clemens as he strikes out some Australian haberdasher who played semi-pro cricket in his youth, the answer is, “no.”)

None of this matters a whit. Baseball always overcomes the crassness, ineptitude, and sheer stupidity of the people in charge of it, and it will do so again from March 3-20 as several hundred of the best ballplayers in the world com pete against one another. The World Baseball Classic will prove a great success, meet its goals, and provide fantastic entertainment and drama for all who watch, and all the problems mentioned above will prove to be mere administrative botches, not anything that threatens the future of the project as a whole. On March 20, The WBC’s enemies will be forced to admit they were wrong, and everyone will end up anticipating the next one fervently.

The first reason for this is that the WBC is played in March. Many people have objected to this, claiming it should be played after the World Series, mainly for fear that players, especially pitchers, will hurt themselves as a result of playing before having worked themselves into shape. This is nonsense. Ballplayers – even ones who look like Bartolo Colon – are athletes. They can handle playing seven games in two weeks, which is how many games the two finalists will end up playing, and won’t be at any more risk for injury in those games than they will be in spring training.

The question of whether a $100 million ballplayer should be put at risk in an exhibition tournament is unanswerable, and a matter of opinion. But there’s no more inherent danger here than there is in playing in Florida or Arizona, and the benefit of playing in March is immense. That’s because, as far as a baseball fan is concerned, there are no real sports played in March.

NBA basketball, which more and more resembles a really well-organized version of the game played at the West 4th Street courts, is at that point in the season when everyone’s just coasting along before the stretch run. NCAA basketball is a bunch of goofy kids who should be doing kegstands or reading Schopenhauer running around for no apparent reason. Hockey may or may not even still exist, as far as the baseball devotee is con cerned. The chance to see full-speed baseball on ESPN while it’s still downjacket weather alone is enough to convince me that the WBC is the best idea since means-testing Social Security.

Still better is the involvement of players almost no one who isn’t a professional scout has ever seen play ball. Many people have told me they’re not interested in the WBC because they already have a chance to see the best ballplayers in the world play against one another from April through October every year. That doesn’t convince me. Like you, I’ve watched baseball all over the country, and one thing I’ve learned is that MLB might be the best baseball you can find, but it isn’t always the most entertaining.

Last July I had better times watching 16-inch softball in Chicago’s Wicker Park, T-ball in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Double-A ball in Harrisburg’s Commerce Bank Park, and a whiffleball game some friends of mine started up in a parking lot than I did watching the Kansas City Royals. Baseball’s about a lot more than the 1% of the 1% who make it to the majors, and anyone who loves the game should be jumping up and down in delight at the prospect of seeing the best China has to offer.

But things are still better than that. After all, Cuba and Japan are playing. We’ve seen how good Jose Contreras, El Duque, and Ichiro are; how tremendous is it going to be to see how good their peers are? Some have dismissed the Japanese contingent, because the likes of Kenji Jojima and Hideki Matsui aren’t going to be playing for them. All to the good, I say; I’d like to see someone otherwise difficult to see. Whether these players prove to be as good as their reputations, overhyped frauds, or something in between, the WBC offers a chance to see something we wouldn’t otherwise be able to see.

Then we come to internationalism. Personally, I don’t find it very compelling in its own right in this context, as it seems mainly to be a code word meaning “the ability of Major League Baseball to sell expensive junk in foreign lands.” Despite the cynicism of MLB’s appropriation of various worthy ideals, though, baseball will win out. It’s the greatest sport in the world, and every time it’s exposed to people, they love it, begin to play it, and eventually get good at it.

If someone had told you 15 years ago that the NBA would be kept afloat as a major sport even in part by guys from places like Croatia, you would have laughed in their face. Who’s to say that the WBC won’t lead eventually to an all-Russian Mets infield, a South African Dodgers rotation, or something else strange and unimaginable? This may be a tertiary side-effect of commissioner Bud Selig’s desire to sell Tony Womack jerseys in Minsk, but that doesn’t really matter.

Finally, these games are going to be enormously fun to watch not only because they’re baseball games featuring wonderful players you’d never otherwise see, but because the crowds are going to be insane. I alluded earlier to the ugly downside of promoting this kind of tournament around jingoism; this has its upside, too.Think for a second about the spectacle of tens of thousands of rabid baseball fans packed into the Tokyo Dome cheering on their idols against the Chinese national team, or of tens of thousand of fans packed into San Juan’s Hiram Bithorn Stadium lustily jeering Cuba.

If MLB has made one serious mistake in organizing this tournament, it’s having the Dominican and Venezuelan teams (my favorites to win the whole thing) play in something called “Disney’s Wide World of Sports,” rather than in Caracas or Santo Domingo. They can be forgiven for that, though; MLB has always been pretty provincial, and the good cheer that will come from Japan and Puerto Rico will make up for a lot.

I understand some, perhaps many of you, will be thoroughly unconvinced by all of this, and if Derek Jeter gets hit in the head with an errant fastball from some Pretorian carpenter, all talk of Russian infields isn’t going to do much for the nerves of Yankees fans. But if we ignore all of MLB’s silly hype about national pride, forget about the placement of Mexican-Irish American Dan Haren on the Dutch roster, the fact that we still don’t know who will be playing for a lot of these teams, and all the rest, we’re left with three weeks’ worth of high-end baseball that should be a blast to watch. Root for Australia, have a few drinks with friends, look out for the gyroball, and have fun. That’s what baseball is all about.

tmarchman@nysun.com