Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
Friday, March 10, 2006, Washington Post

Baseball Makes Worldwide Pitch

The World Baseball Classic is in full swing. That's the new tournament in which all-star teams from 16 countries are playing in baseball's first true world championship.

Some people think that the WBC will be a big hit, something like soccer's World Cup. Other people think it's going to strike out.

That's hard to predict. Some of the biggest sports events started small. Don't believe me? Let's look at some sports history.

• The Super Bowl now is about the biggest game around, but there wasn't much interest in the first one. When the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, in 1967, there were more than 30,000 empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.
  
  
• Folks were excited about the first World Series , in 1903. The crowds were so big that some fans had to stand behind ropes in the outfield to watch the Boston Pilgrims (later called the Red Sox) and their star pitcher, Cy Young, beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, five games to three.

But the National League didn't even take part the next year. John McGraw, manager of the NL champion New York Giants, did not like Ban Johnson, the founder of the American League. So McGraw refused to allow his team to play the Pilgrims.

• The first World Cup was held in 1930 in the small South American country of Uruguay. Why? Because Uruguay was the only country that offered to pay the travel and living expenses of visiting soccer teams. Even so, only 12 other countries (including the United States) sent teams. Remember, there were no regular plane trips across oceans in those days. It took two weeks to travel from Europe to Uruguay by boat. Uruguay got its money's worth: It won the first World Cup by defeating Argentina, 4-2, in the final game.

This summer, 32 teams will play for the World Cup in Germany, and billions of people will watch on television.

• When Pierre de Coubertin started the modern Olympic Games in Greece in 1896, 241 male athletes from 14 countries participated. (Female athletes didn't take part until 1900.) Greece won more medals than any other country, including a gold in the marathon, which had 17 runners, 13 of them from Greece. When the Summer Games returned to Athens two years ago, there were 11,099 athletes (40 percent of them women).

The first Winter Olympics, in 1924, was nothing like the huge media event in and around Turin, Italy, last month. For the 1924 Games in the Alpine village of Chamonix, France, 258 athletes, including 11 women, showed up. Turin hosted more than 2,500 athletes.

Maybe someday the WBC will turn into a baseball spectacular that is the Super Bowl, World Cup and Olympics all rolled into one. But history shows us it's hard to tell from the first one.