Cuban baseball

I usually really enjoy Jon Miller's infectious love of baseball. Joe Morgan's analysis of techniques can be very interesting, too, if his analysis of statistics and strategy are seldom insightful. The PowerLine guys take note of what was taken to be pro-Cuba talk from them during the World Baseball Classic semifinals.

Having read this, while I watched almost the entire championship game last night (BTW, if the WBC is such a major event, why was its coverage delayed for the end of an NIT — a glorified loser's bracket —game?), I paid close attention to what they said about Cuba. It turned out to be, more or less, nothing. I don't know how you can spend 3 hours talking about the Cuban baseball team without mentioning the politics at all. As far as ESPN's coverage went, they might as well have been a team from any other Latin American country. I think it would be at least worth mentioning that these guys were basically on a work-release program from prison.

I got to wondering about why totalitarian regimes often have success in sports that can be disproportionate to their populations and resources. It is true that these regimes see success in international sports competitions as useful for propaganda and therefore expend extra resources to pursue it.

But where do the athletes come from? I would expect that, in a free society, a person with both non-marketable athletic talent (say, a water polo player) and other, marketable, talents would be more likely to pursue the latter than someone that lives in a society that has no markets. In addition, competitive sports is probably the closest to a real meritocracy available in a country with no markets.

By the way, Japan won. I went to sleep during the top of the 9th after they took a 9-5 lead. Ichiro was right in the middle of the rally. Earlier in the game, Joe Morgan remarked that Ichiro, as the first position player from Japan to play in the Majors, was carrying the "hopes of a nation" and was probably under more pressure to play well than any player ever had been. I guess he forgot Jackie Robinson.