Explain why all those poor latin countries are so good as bsseball...
Being pushed in elementary school has very little to do with a nation's ability to assemble a few good players or teams. Soccer has been pushed heavily in elementary school in America for over 30 years (ie more than 5 complete waves of elementary school students) and we've only just barely begun to produce enough pretty good players for our national team to make it to the good part of the World Cup. Latin America has a love of baseball that runs deep and long, for an individual player baseball is pretty cheap (a glove and a bat or even a stick and you're good to go), easy for even poor Latin American kids to afford, it's on a school level when you're trying to give 30 odd kids some excercise that baseball gets expensive.
Speaking of which, I actually looked forward to the World Baseball Classic. I am embarassed that we did so poorly, yet for some reason I saw no need to convince my fellow FReepers that baseball is for girls.