USA to open World Baseball Classic Tuesday vs Mexico

USA opens play Tuesday afternoon against Mexico at 4pm. USA is the heavy favorite to win this inaugural event that has a similar format that is used for World Cup for soccer. USA is in Pool B along with Canada, South Africa and before mentioned Mexico. It is round-robin format so each team will face one another and the top 2 teams will advance to the second round. Here is the roster for the USA team.

The USA team is represented by two Atlanta Braves in Chipper Jones and Jeff Francoeur.
Other notables on the team include, Roger Clemens, Dontrelle Willis, Derrick Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Johnny Damon and Ken Griffey Jr.

Click here for the complete breakdown of players with MLB teams.

List of teams and pools.

I think this classic is a great thing since the Olympics voted to remove baseball as one of it's sports. I only wish that there could be a better time to play it. I say in the future we can afford to eliminate the AllStar game in favor of playing this in the mid season when everyone is in game mode. Unfortunately I don't think this is the best group of players that the USA could produce but as is with all new things, there will be some growing pains and lessons learned. So I'm sure the Classic in another 4 years will have a different date with more available players.

Go team USA, bring the championship home.