Don’t sleep on noisy Japanese in WBC

Designated hitter Andruw Jones, left, of the Netherlands is tagged out by South Korean catcher Kang Minho after missing home plate in the fourth inning of a World Baseball Classic first-round game Saturday at Taipei, Taiwan. The Netherlands won, 5-0.

It was the wee hours of the morning when I woke, on the couch, to the sound of trumpets and a somewhat familiar voice, which sounded like Rich Waltz, the former Las Vegas Stars broadcaster. A half-empty box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers and a nozzled can totally devoid of aerosol cheese were on the coffee table. Bacon-flavored.

Weird dream.

Really weird dream.

Alas, it wasn’t a dream at all. It was the eighth inning of a ballgame, and trumpets were blaring because Japan either had a rally going against Brazil, or one of the Japanese batters (probably the cleanup man) had just dropped a sacrifice bunt or hit a sacrifice fly. Because this is what the Japanese do: They play station-to-station baseball, by The Book. And when they execute the way it is written in The Book, Japanese baseball fans blow fanfares on trumpets. And they cheer like mad.

Actually, Japanese baseball fans cheer like mad from the first pitch to the last pitch of a ballgame, and sometimes even when it rains and the grounds crew rolls out the tarpaulin, provided the grounds crew is efficient and rolls out the tarp by The Book.

So the ballparks over there rock like college football stadiums on Saturday afternoon in the Southeastern Conference. And Waltz, who has moved on to the Miami Marlins broadcast booth, really was getting into this ballgame.

Combined with the sacrifices and the trumpets, he woke me up.

The World Baseball Classic, which is played every three or four years, is back on the MLB Network. And not a moment too soon, because it has been four full months since the long hairs from San Francisco swept past Detroit in the Fall Classic.

(One could make an argument, especially this week, that the World Series really should be called the National Series, were it not for 108 years of tradition and the large stash of stationery.)

Four months is too long without baseball for the true baseball fan.

NASCAR fans, for example, do not go four months without NASCAR.

The last race of 2012 was Nov. 18; the first race of 2013 was last week, in February. Plus they have the awards banquet here, and that’s on TV; and they have that Bud Shootout thing, or whatever they now call it, and that’s on TV; then they drive practice laps most days of the week, or so it seems, and these practices are on TV, too.

They never show batting practice on TV, though Astros vs. Nationals or Reds is sort of like batting practice.

And though there is a certain charm to the Grapefruit League and the Cactus League, mostly because games are played in warm sunshine when a cold beer in the bleachers tastes best, sometimes the scores of these games are 16-12. Guys with jersey numbers in the 70s wearing spikes that don’t match the jersey color often get into these games by the fifth inning.

I have been to Cactus League games at which portly pitchers put on rubber suits and run wind sprints in the outfield with the game in progress. And sometimes when the score is tied 11-11 after nine innings, they just call it a tie and send you back to the hotel in Scottsdale.

There weren’t any ties on opening day of the World Baseball Classic.

Chinese Taipei, called Taiwan when they were kicking our butts with 15-year-olds in the Little League World Series, beat Australia 4-1, because whereas the Aussies are fundamentally sound on defense, Australia still is mostly a rugby nation or a footy nation or a nation that mourns the Bee Gees.

Upstart Brazil, managed by Barry Larkin, led Japan, the only champion this tournament has known, 3-2 after seven. But then the Japanese manager starting pulling managerial strings, way better than Bobby Valentine did over there, and then the Japanese started with the sacrifices again, and before long it was 5-3 for the Fighting Fukudomes (though he and Ichiro aren’t playing this year).

The Kingdom of the Netherlands, which is how Joe Magrane and the other guy in the booth referred to the Dutch on first reference, upset Korea, the runner-up in the last WBC, despite the elephantine presence of Andruw Jones on the Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium basepaths.

Jones, a former Atlanta Braves All-Star now playing for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles of the Japanese Pacific League, was born in Curacao, which until 2010 was part of the Netherlands Antilles. He ran the bases as if he learned the game in Kazakhstan in the Borat League.

In one of the early innings, Jones was called safe at home plate though he slid wide of it by a mile, and subsequently was called out. In a later inning, he bowled over the Korean second baseman before he could field the ball; Jones was called out for this, too.

The Dutch skipper was Hensley Meulens, also of Curacao, and when was the last time you heard his name?

I would be remiss in not mentioning that in the first inning of the first World Baseball Classic game, Lance Barksdale blew the first call he had as first-base umpire from there to downtown Taichung City.

Trumpets were blaring as I reached for the first Chicken in a Biskit of the season and loaded it up with a CC Sabathia-sized dollop of bacon-flavored aerosol cheese.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.