Daily Notes: Ft. A Schedule of Upcoming Actual Baseball

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. A Schedule of Upcoming Actual Baseball
2. GIF: Last Pitch of the 2009 WBC

A Schedule of Upcoming Actual Baseball
With the announcement scheduled for Thursday of all 16 WBC provisional rosters and also the continued progression of the various winter-league playoffs — which end, finally, with the Caribbean Series (in Hermosillo, Mexico this year) — the prospect of real-live baseball is an actual thing.

Below are three upcoming events that will offer said real and live baseball to the reader.

Event: 2013 Caribbean Series
Dates: February 1-7
Notes: The Caribbean Series features the winners of the four major winter leagues from the Dominican, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela — and looks likely to feature, for example, Elvis Andrus and Pablo Sandoval this season (whose Magallanes team is currently first place in the Venezuelan league’s playoff round robin) and probably Javier Vazquez (who continues to dominate for Caguas in Puerto Rico). While in past seasons the Caribbean Series has utilized merely a round-robin format, this year’s edition will feature a proper final (about which one can read here). The Series is generally available on both MLB Network and MLB.com.

Event: College Baseball
Dates: Fridays, Saturday, and Sundays, Beginning February 15
Notes: Anxious to watch real baseball, but having no way of doing so until at least the beginning of spring training, the author acquired a subscription to CBS Sports ULive last February and spent a month-plus consuming the college game before the professional one started. This will be of no interest whatsoever to some readers; however, by spending time with the college game, I was able to see Florida’s Mike Zunino, Stanford’s Mark Appel, and Florida State’s James Ramsey in game action — all of whom were taken in the first round of the 2012 draft. One suggestion: use Aaron Fitt’s Weekend Previews, available at Baseball America, as a guide for your viewing.

Event: World Baseball Classic
Dates: March 2-19
Notes: While the 2013 Classic itself features 16 teams separated into four pools as in previous editions, the qualifying round for this year’s version was considerably more robust, featuring an additional 12 teams from which four teams eventually qualified for the tournament proper. In theory, this year’s WBC could feature a scenario in which Craig Kimbrel closes out a game for R.A. Dickey, which is an amusing thought to have.

GIF: Last Pitch of the 2009 WBC
Here’s the last pitch from the most recent edition of the World Baseball Classic — a largely devastating slider from Yu Darvish: