Let's Japan.org Debunking Eikaiwa and Ramblings in Japan

I'm not a huge baseball fan, but I follow the sport. It's been impossible to avoid seeing the results of "Samurai Japan" given their success. They've been playing well and don't seem to miss Ichiro's bat. However, for a tournament that is supposed to spread the goodness of baseball around the world, Japan will play Korea for the fifth time in the tournament.

Jason Coskrey in the Japan Times writes:

The World Baseball Classic may involve 16 nations, but this year's tournament has looked more like a Japan-South Korea invitational.

The two Asian nations have faced each other four times in the WBC and will meet for a fifth time in the final if Japan defeats the United States in its semifinal game on Sunday.

There's a saying that familiarity breeds contempt, and it's likely many fans are growing weary of Japan facing South Korea at the WBC.

Nobody expects the WBC to be perfect in its second tournament — the first WBC was held in 2006 — but a pair of teams possibly facing each other five times begs for a format change.

Adding more teams or mixing up the second round groupings could be one way to combat the problem.

Simply shipping Japan and South Korea to different locations in the second round would have eliminated two meetings between the countries.

I think he's being too diplomatic here. He should be asking how on earth two teams can meet five times in a single tournament. It seems like an easy thing to fix, but nobody has done anything about it. In the 2006 WBC, Korea had a winning record of 6-1 (the best record of all teams in the tournament) but never made it to the final match because they lost to Japan, a team they had previously beaten twice.

The WBC is a great idea in principle, but changes have to be made in order to not only keep it going but to help it grow as well.

Absolutely. It feels like Korea has been on the TV the whole time. It's ridiculous and makes for a boring tournament. Start by fixing the format. How difficult is it to create a round-robin tournament?