We’re #3! (Or is it #4?)

Japan won the World Baseball Classic for the second consecutive time this week, and despite having the most major leaguers of any team in the tournament, the U.S. was eliminated by Japan and came in either third or fourth overall (no one seems to be able to say for sure which it was). How could this have happened? After all, we introduced baseball to the Japanese in the 1930s after we’d been playing it nearly 100 years.

According to the American players, Japan did the little things, and played with basic fundamentals; the United States did not. Players repeatedly referred to the Japanese team’s attention to detail as if it were a foreign concept or a long-lost art.

Brian Roberts, the team’s second baseman, said: “When you play Japan, when you play Korea and those countries, they’re going to play fundamentally sound baseball. They’re going to do all the little things. You have to focus on the fundamentals. Americans, we probably don’t do as good a job of that as they do at times.”

Shortstop Jimmy Rollins added: “They don’t worry about the big things. They didn’t worry about trying to drive the ball out of the ballpark. When you put the ball in play, you can find holes. And they play with passion.”

Derek Jeter said, “They don’t strike out. “Everybody puts the ball in play. They all run. If I could do it or teach it, I would.”

After winning the championship game and celebrating for an hour or more, the Japanese players showered, and then put on a clean Japanese team uniform. They were still representing Japan, and the team comes first.

Who said sports aren’t an apt metaphor for life in America today?

ALSO: Tom Friedman makes my point better than I could in his column today urging President Obama to be bold.

Another good read courtesy of AY: "The Big Takeover" from the current Rolling Stone. Excerpt: "People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations."

And as reminder that there is always another side to the story, read the resignation letter from an AIG employee that was reprinted today in the Times.