Baseball's ancient and distant cousin, cricket, has fairly flexible rules for players hopping to different countries. Basically, a player who has resided in a country for more than a half-year in each of the preceding four years can play for that country regardless of his birthplace or citizenship.

This rule allowed Kevin Pietersen, born and raised in South Africa, to become a key member of the England team. As you might expect, this nation-hopping didn't sit well with South African fans. When Pietersen visted South Africa with the England team, the fans stood and turned their backs on him as he walked out to bat.

To give Pietersen his due, he had a legitimate beef with South Africa's racial quota system, which discriminated aginst white players. That system now seems to have been quietly dropped, because it was hurting South Africa's results in international cricket.

It wouldn't suprise me if baseball adopted similarly flexible rules to help guarantee a more equal distribution of talent in the world cup.

By the way, South Africa's apparent decision to drop racial quota systems in selecting their international teams is one of the true feel-good stories in all of sports.

The decision has already paid dividends in cricket, where South Africa has hopped back up to second in the one-day international rankings, behind only (of course) Australia. South Africa has climbed back up to fourth in the test rankings.

The real test (sorry) will come when South Africa visits Australia in December through February, and the Aussies return the favor in March and April. South Africa will face Australia in six tests, at least nine ODI's, and two Twenty20 matches. (These are the five-day, one-day, and two-and-a-half-hour forms of the game.)

This might not be pleasant for the South Africans. Australia looks ticked off and has been burying all opposition since their shock loss in the Ashes. They just got finished plowing under the hapless West Indies by 379 runs in the Brisbane test.

Even in cricket, 379 runs are a lot of runs.

I remember in the 2004 Olympics there was some speculation that Eric Karros might play for the Greek team.

Anyway, especially with A-Rod, that Dominican starting 9 will be one of the most fearsome lineups ever assembled. The USA pitching staff will be incredible, too, assuming the big names show up to play. And you know what the funny thing is? It's baseball, and nobody knows who will win until they play the games.

(South Africa would be pretty frickin' surprising, though.)

What about the in-game rules? Will there be a DH in this tournament? If not, especially since there will likely be pitch counts, things could be really interesting.

i'm not sure if this is good or bad for the Classic. I understand the desire to spread the talent over a larger amount of teams but at the same time I would actually like for the countries to mean something. It's hard to get behind your national team when stars from your country are playing elsewhere and there are stars from another country playing on your team. This, along with mandated pitch counts leads me to believe this will be nothing more than marketing hype until it matures in fifteen or twenty years.