Afternoon Baseball

ESPN.com

Guillen wants to blast A-Rod for his waffling over the WBC. Fair enough, the on-going drama was pretty ludicrous, even if much of the supposed indecision was the manipulations and false rumors of baseball execs and "friends" of A-Rod.
But this statement is foolish:

"He knew he wasn't going to play for the Dominicans; he's not a Dominican!"

A-Rod has dual citizenship, but he's not Dominican. So, I guess Ozzie getting American citizenship was just smoke and mirrors. Put this freeloader on the next boat!
Look, it's not A-Rod's fault that the WBC is basically letting everyone play for any country in the world. There are guys playing for Italy and the Netherlands with dubious connections by American standards. But two things apply: One, many Olympians don't even live/train in their native country, yet compete for them. Secondly, other countries define citizenship differently. In Ireland, for instance, it's based on where your parents were born. There's a cross-country runner at Iona that my school runs against. Born in San Francisco, but runs for Ireland all the time because her parents are Irish, and that's their rule.
An example of that is also Nomar, who has Mexican parents (both, I believe), and Ozzie is, of course, dead wrong on this as well:

It's the same with [Nomar] Garciaparra playing for Mexico. Garciaparra only knows Cancun because he went to visit."

Cute, Ozzie. Making the Cancun reference, cause if Nomar's about anything, it's jet-hopping to Cancun to score some chicks. Besides, everyone knows that the U.S. secretly owns Cancun. How else would it be a safe place for thousands of naive college co-eds to go be wasted for a week and not all have horrific things happen to them? Also, while we're talking about Third World nations, maybe Nomar's smart not to be hanging out in Mexico. Latin America is a haven for kidnapping and extortion if you're famous, no matter how much you give back. Ugueth Urbina was always going back home, and his mom was kidnapped and he's in jail as a result.

By the citizenship standards established above, and the WBC's own weak rules, A-Rod can compete for either county without question. Perhaps Ozzie is right that A-Rod strung along the Dominicans, never intending to play for them. But to say he's not Dominican, well, that betrays a mind lacking any type of in-depth thinking outside of a baseball diamond. And it's something a white person could never get away with saying, by the way.

If only Ozzie had weighed in on the Cuba debate. But maybe he knows how large a man Jose Contreras is, and doesn't want to get beat up on the day pitchers and catchers report.

A more geopolitical view on the scenario. To be fair, I think guys like Piazza and Mulder, who aren't actually natives of Italy and the Netherlands, respectively, are the worst offenders here.