POOL A

The big story in Pool A is the Japanese team’s loss of top catcher Kenji Jojima, top second baseman Tadahito Iguchi, and its best power hitter, Hideki Matsui, all of whom are staying in camp with their major league teams. Japan is still about as good a bet as any other team to make the finals, but it’s not going to be running out its best team.

This leaves a huge opening for Korea, which doesn’t have the kind of offensive talent even a weakened Japanese team does, but does have enough quality pitchers to have an outside shot at winning the whole thing. Korea is hungry for respect, and this is the matchup to watch.

JAPAN

The player I’m most looking forward to here is Daisuke Matsuzaka, the 25-year-old pitching star of the Seibu Lions. He’s a heck of a talent who started the first game of the Japanese World Series when he was 21 and rang up a 2.30 ERA last year, but what’s most interesting is that he throws only two pitches. The first is a fastball that reportedly comes in at 97; the second is called the gyroball. I’ve seen footage of the thing, and it can best be described as a Bugs Bunny pitch. It moves like a straight fastball right until it meets the plate, at which point it takes a 90-degree turn away from a right-handed batter. The mysterious “double-spin mechanics” that allow Matsuzaka to throw this thing have been the source of much intrigue over the last few years, and as rumor has had him coming to MLB for quite a while now, his start against Taiwan on Saturday (4 a.m. on ESPN2) will offer the first good look at what may be eventually be the biggest pitching craze since the splitfingered fastball.

KOREA

Anyone who’s seen Shea Stadium filled with Korean-Americans on days when Jae-Weong Seo is pitching knows the kind of love the country has for baseball, and this team is running out some serious talent. Seo, Chan-Ho Park, and Sunny Kim aren’t Hall of Famers, but they’ve all succeeded at the highest level and are all quite capable of shutting down any team in the world in the right circumstances. The team’s positional talent is a lot weaker – Hee-Seop Choi, a platoon first baseman who’s bounced around the majors and never lived up to the promise he showed in the Cubs’ system, might be the best hitter – but they’re quite capable of surprising. Korea also has the gloriously-named Jung Bong as part of a solid relief crew.

TAIWAN

The aforementioned Matsuzaka claimed recently after watching them that Taiwan’s pitchers throw a lot of nasty breaking balls.They’ll have to, as their best pitcher, the Yankees’ Chien-Ming Wang, probably won’t be participating, and none of their next-best pitchers throw in the 90s. Their best player, Chin-Feng Chen, has never made it out of Triple-A despite being touted as a great prospect with the Dodgers for years.Taiwan probably has a bright future in baseball, but they’re not yet ready to play with Japan and Korea. On the happy side, they’ll be able to strike a symbolic blow for democracy by whipping China.Too bad MLB went gutless and bowed to the ab surd convention of calling this country “Chinese Taipei.” Maybe America can be known as “British Washington.”

CHINA

Clay Davenport of Baseball Prospectus has been studying the competitive levels of various international leagues for years. His methodology basically involves comparing the statistics of players who have played in established American leagues to the statistics they compiled in foreign leagues. Such a method shows, for instance, that Japanese baseball is a bit above Triple-A in quality; China is about at the level of a good high school program. (The national team lost 17-0 and got on base only four times in a recent exhibition against the Yomiuri Giants.) The question here is how badly they get throttled, and whether it inspires any largescale national desire to get better in the game or inspires an aversion to it.

POOL B

There’s not a lot of drama here.It would be a pretty huge upset if anyone managed to beat the Americans, and South Africa’s own manager admits they probably wouldn’t be able to handle an American short-season team. The suspense is in whether Canada or Mexico is going to make it into the next round, and given that both teams are comprised largely of players who have seen time in American baseball,that’s not the most exciting issue in the tournament.Were things set up so that America would be able to run up a 15-0 score and a couple of easy wins to get the fans here excited about the WBC? Maybe, but what’s certain is that Team America’s games are going to get coverage out of all proportion to what they deserve.

UNITED STATES

Well, there’s not too much to say about the American team.These are all big shot players with clean reputations, the best and brightest of American baseball. If it’s not the absolute best conceivable team that could be put on the field, it is something better – a collection of players that really represents the game, with everyone from Roger Clemens to Matt Holliday (he plays left field for the Rockies, if you’re wondering) getting a spot on the roster. Some may disagree, but it was a good idea to put together a team just good enough to possibly be upset – little would be better than for America to get knocked out of the WBC before the semifinals.

A tip of the hat to baseball, by the way, for the presence of two young black starters on the staff – neither Dontrelle Willis nor C.C. Sabathia (although he dropped out yesterday) is an affirmative action pick, but others could have made the squad, and at a time when interest in the game among black athletes is a real problem, it will be wonderful to see Dontrelle out there with a big flag on his chest.

CANADA

This team is better than you might think. With the Pirates’ Jason Bay, the Twins’ Justin Morneau, the Royals’ Matt Stairs, and the Brewers’ Corey Koskie, they have a potent middle of the order, and their starting troika of Orioles Adam Loewen and Erik Bedard and Rockie Jeff Francis – all exceptionally promising young lefty strikeout artists – might be very good. They have two problems – first, they have almost no right-handed hitting, and second, they have to play the United Staes. Given how the Expos affair played out, you have to root for the Canadians to pull an upset and win the whole thing.

MEXICO

There’s a book to be written about all the reasons there are so few Mexicans in the major leagues, but talent isn’t the issue. Think mafia-like control of player movement by paternalistic owners, a Byzantine system for transferring contracts to America that makes Japan’s posting system seem quirky, and cuts in scouting budgets as baseball executives learn all the wrong lessons from sabermetrics.

Much like Canada, this team has a good middle of the lineup (Jorge Cantu,Vinny Castilla, and Erubiel Durazo) and two pitchers they could conceivably ride all the way through the tournament in Esteban Loaiza and Oliver Perez, who led the NL in K/9 two years ago. Mexico’s odds are a bit lower – no Mexican player is anywhere near as good as Jason Bay – but they have a good shot at getting out of the first round.

SOUTH AFRICA

Talk about low expectations. Rick Magnante, who’s managing this team, toldMLB.comlast week, “We don’t want it to be a demoralizing situation for these kids.We just want to get them to the point where they’re competitive, and we get to play at least five innings every game.” Hoping the mercy rule doesn’t get invoked on you isn’t a way to win ballgames, but South Africa’s not there to win – only six players on the roster have even played professionally. Instead, they’re in the tournament because MLB would like to make money in South Africa one day.That’s great – it’s just to be hoped that the American team shows some sportsmanship while bludgeoning them.

POOL C

While there was never any chance of it happening, how great would it have been for South Africa to have been booted out of the tournament in favor of a Free Cuban team? Defectors like Ariel Prieto and Jose Contreras are rightly angry that they won’t get to represent their country, whose team will be made up of prisoners who play for almost nothing and have no control over their own careers. Leaving the politics aside, seeing these Cuban players is going to be one of the very best things about the tournament. Given what we know, though, they’re not going to be as dominant as you might suspect. This pool might actually see the best, most competitive baseball in the first round, just because it has the most evenly matched teams. There’s no China or South Africa in this bracket, and also no United States. That’s probably a good thing.

CUBA

The mystique of the Cuban national baseball team is based on a few things. First, they’ve been so dominant in international baseball because they’ve used the best players in the country, while other countries haven’t. (If Venezuela had Johan Santana and Carlos Zambrano pitching for them in the Olympics, they’d do pretty well.) Second, the players who have made it to America are generally the very best in Cuba; while the dictatorship is obviously capable of producing Hall of Famecaliber talents like Orlando Hernandez, the fact that those are the players we see makes it easy to inflate how good Cuba’s players are. Finally, the fact that Cuban baseball has been a closed system for so long has lent it the allure of the unknown; in truth, the best guess is that the true quality of play is about equivalent to that you’d see at a Brooklyn Cyclones game.

While shrouded in the usual mystery, the Cuban team is apparently going to be comprised not of the absolute best players, but mainly of a new generation of youngsters being broken into international competition. When I say young, I mean young – apparently, Dayan Viciedo will be playing, and he’s 16.There will be some veteran stars on the team, like regular .400 hitter Osmani Urrutia, but for the most part they won’t be the most seasoned players around.Is this be ing done to give Castro a built-in excuse should his team lose? I don’t have sources high up in the Cuban government, but it sure is convenient.

PUERTO RICO

With a lineup featuring studs like Ivan Rodriguez and the Mets’ Carlos Delgado and Carlos Beltran, the Puerto Rican team is going to make the next round. The problem is the pitching – past Javier Vazquez (not himself the most reliable hurler in the world), the team has Mariners’ fifth starter Joel Piniero,a bunch of Triple-A journeymen and A-ball prospects, and some decent relievers like J.C. Romero. Puerto Rico is almost certainly the best team in this pool, but still more comparable to Canada than to Venezuela, despite the star power in the lineup.

NETHERLANDS

This just isn’t fair. Why should tiny island nations have to compete with a sprawling empire? The Netherlands summoned royalty from its Aruban possessions (Sir Sidney Ponson, best known for drunkenly beating up a judge on a beach and being a genuine knight), an MVP candidate from its Curacaoan territory (Andruw Jones), and even tried to lay claim to America, Ireland, and Mexico when it placed Mark Mulder and Dan Haren on its roster for some reason (neither will play). Attempts at world domination aside, the Dutch have a surprisingly good team, as they’re by far the strongest European nation in baseball. They beat Cuba in the 2000 Olympics, and with the influx of knights and colonial subjects (among them Randall Simon, who once infamously whacked one of the Brewers’ running sausage mascots with a bat), they have a puncher’s chance of shocking everyone and making the second round.

PANAMA

Even without Mariano Rivera, the Panamanians are about as good as the Dutch on paper, with slugger Carlos Lee and pitchers Bruce Chen and Ramiro Mendoza being the best-known players on the team. Panama’s heavily scouted, so it’s unlikely that some super-prospect is going to announce his arrival to the baseball world during the WBC, but you never know.

POOL D

This is where the action’s going to be. Venezuela and the Dominican Republic boast, respectively, the best pitching and the best lineup in the tournament, and they may be the two best teams in the field, full-stop. Neither of the other two teams has any real chance to advance, but they’re interesting; Australia has started producing some highquality players over the last five years, and Italy’s lax eligibility policies have enabled them to fill their roster with ringers who have no connection whatever to the country. That these games will be played in front of American crowds is a bad joke, and it shouldn’t happen again.

VENEZUELA

Johan Santana and Carlos Zambrano are two of the five best pitchers in baseball; Freddy Garcia is their thirdbest pitcher. That alone may make Venezuela the team to beat. The offense is better than you may realize; one of two longtime Japanese-league sluggers, Alex Cabrera or Roberto Petagine, should play first, mashing Tigers shortstop Carlos Guillen should play third, and the outfield is loaded, with the likes of Bobby Abreu, Miguel Cabrera, and Magglio Ordonez. Add in Victor Martinez, the best-hitting catcher in baseball, World Series hero Francisco Rodriguez at closer, and World Series-winning manager Ozzie Guillen, and the circumstances look right for Venezuela to stake its claim as the home of the best baseball talent in the world. Watch out for Francisco Liriano; he’s the best pitching prospect in baseball and could form a staggering 1-2 punch with Santana for the Twins as soon as this summer.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

So they’re a little thin in pitching; having Pedro Martinez and defending Cy Young winner Bartolo Colon as your top two starters makes up for a lot. Similarly, they don’t have much behind the plate, and Manny Ramirez has dropped out of the tournament, but how do you pitch a heart of the order consisting of Albert Pujols, David Ortiz, Miguel Tejada, and Alfonso Soriano? When Jose Reyes and Adrian Beltre are afterthoughts in an offense, that’s pretty scary. It’s quite possible that if things play out right, we could see all three of Venezuela’s big guns pitching to this lineup, and while I’m not too thrilled by the All-Star game element of the WBC, that will absolutely be something to see, as will the first sighting of Reyes and 47-year-old Julio Franco on the same team. Baseball is grand.

AUSTRALIA

There’s a lot of talent in Australia; top prospects like Justin Huber and Chris Snelling (who isn’t playing) come from there, as do serviceable veteran pitchers like John Stephens and Damian Moss. Personally, I’ll be cheering for Dave Nilsson, a former All-Star catcher who started up his own baseball league in his native country, something that will doubtless lead to many following players like Huber and Snelling to the majors. Just because of the competition in this pool, the team has no chance of advancing, but this is a baseball power on the rise and Nilsson has a lot to do with that. It would be nice to see him have a big moment in one of these games. Also keep an eye on Phil Brassington, whom Baseball America describes as a “self-taught knuckleballer.” Hopefully he’ll get to pitch to Pujols and Ortiz.

ITALY

Bah. You’d think a country that extended an open invitation to anyone with a vowel in his last name could roll out a better bunch of carpetbaggers than this: Aside from Mike Piazza and Frank Catalanatto, the biggest name here is probably Jason Simontacchi, a former Cardinals pitcher most noted for his absurd presence on Italy’s 2000 Olympic team. (His 1.17 ERA in those Olympics got him his job with the Cards.) Italy does have its own young baseball league, but it’s not heavily scouted and is thought to be at best comparable to short-season minor league ball. That may be generous. As in other cases, though, here’s hoping the team does something memorable enough to make baseball more popular in its country.