A baseball first for the country that invented the game is hard to come by, so it’s something to behold. It’s kind of like something happening for the first time in China — there’s so much history, any first is startling.

But this has to go down as the first time Team USA really, truly did us proud.

Other nations have deeper resumes in international baseball than the nation that calls the sport its national pastime and has for more than a century rightfully called its professional championship the World Series.

With that in mind, rating on a scale of 1-to-10 in terms of the significance to Team USA’s international baseball history, this one goes to 11.

What a game. What a finish. And in the end what an accomplishment for a team that has had a ton of pressure on it, for good reason. The 6-5 comeback victory over Puerto Rico was everything you’d want from a game in March, July or October, just pure entertainment down the last drop, just inside the right-field foul line off the bat of David Wright. Now that was truly something to behold.

With that monkey off its back and Dodger Stadium in ink on its itinerary, Team USA can go about the business of laying claim to the Classic title they didn’t come close to winning in 2006.

Not that it’s theirs for the taking. At the moment, no team seems to be playing better at the right time than Korea, and Venezuela is absolutely loaded.

But the U.S. did some things it hadn’t done before in Classic play, either this year  — it thrilled, it dug deep and it showed that the U.S. has a little something to say in this world party of ball.

Yakyu Haiku
That’s the American tradition of baseball in Japanese, and here’s an Americanized version of a Japanese tradition:
Cole is cool, or so
It seems after a spring scare –
important elbow