3 ms·

Judging by the number of players imported from Latin America, I think the US only has enough players for a half-dozen MLB-level teams.

• rdouble 16y ago
  In the USA, Baseball is not as popular as a kid's pastime as it once was. Little leagues are having trouble getting enough kids to actually have games...
• Locke1689 16y ago
  As I said in a cousin comment, the nationality of the players is irrelevant. I would count non-Japanese citizens playing in the NPB as members of Japanese professional baseball, just as I count Mo as a member of the MLB.
  • jimbokun 16y ago
    As I noted in another comment, we can compare MLB with the English Premier League. MLB and the EPL are considered the best leagues in the world for their respective sports, but that does not mean that the U.S. and England produce the best players. Comparing the two leagues, MLB has placed a greater emphasis on the home run (probably because Japanese players are smaller on average than many U.S. and Latin American players). However, that does not necessarily make the Japanese style worse when it comes to winning games. The World Baseball Classic is the only serious competition we've had to compare national styles at the highest level, and so far the Japanese system has won out. Granted, a sample size of two is probably not significant, but it seems all we have to go by.
    • Locke1689 16y ago
      As I noted in another comment, we can compare MLB with the English Premier League. MLB and the EPL are considered the best leagues in the world for their respective sports, but that does not mean that the U.S. and England produce the best players. Except that that's never what I said. I said the MLB is a more competitive ball league than EPL. With the internationalization of trade and sports I'm not sure it's terribly important what the nationalities of the players are. The World Baseball Classic is the only serious competition we've had to compare national styles at the highest level, and so far the Japanese system has won out. Granted, a sample size of two is probably not significant, but it seems all we have to go by. As a good statistician would say, a result with an insignificant sample size is worse than no result at all because it can fool one (as it did you) into thinking it has any significance at all.