It never made much sense, did it, this World Baseball Classic?

The timing didn't fit, in the middle of spring training, when most of these major-leaguers are stiff as a board and barely familiar with their new teammates. The format didn't match the sport, with the final two rounds being single-elimination, which in baseball is only slightly different than deciding the outcome by a series of coin tosses. And selecting the participants is hardly a sensible process, when major-league teams have so much influence on who can or can't play, or when Alex Rodriguez can play for one country then decide to switch allegiances three years later.

From a distance, it appears more of a contrived concoction than a meaningful international tournament. Then you get up close, as South Florida had a chance to do Saturday when the WBC made its debut at Dolphin Stadium, and suddenly it makes all the sense in the world.

To truly get this event, you have to be there.

The first thing you notice, well before the introductions or national anthems or first pitch, is how much the players actually enjoy taking part in something this significant in mid-March. It's not spring training, and these All-Stars and MVPs and World Series champs aren't spending their entire day prepping for two innings of playing time in a meaningless game only to spend the next seven innings watching the equivalent of a Double A exhibition.

This is actual, high-level competition that just so happens to come with the added benefit of representing your country.

One of the most memorable moments caught on camera of the U.S. team's debut against Canada last week was when Adam Dunn, watching a tight ninth inning from the dugout, was playfully checking his racing pulse as J.J. Putz was closing out the win.

That was real, and it never happens to these players at this time of year if not for this event.

Then there's the atmosphere, which resembles more the World Cup of soccer than it does any baseball game this country is used to.

It starts with the autograph seekers who race to the seats just above the dugouts in much larger numbers than Dolphin Stadium is used to. And who could blame them when Derek Jeter, David Wright, Chipper Jones and Jimmy Rollins are just a few feet away, and Mike Schmidt eventually saunters past the batting cage with a swinging fungo bat dangerously hanging out of his back pocket.

Then the introductions start, and you realize that even though this is technically the United States and it is the U.S. team playing on this Saturday night, this is by no means a U.S.-friendly crowd.

The inordinate number of drums and tambourines in the crowd should have been the first hint, but it became blatantly apparent that this was a pro-Puerto Rico crowd when the Puerto Ricans took the field to a resounding ovation, and it had nothing to do with the fact two former Marlins, Carlos Delgado and Pudge Rodriguez, were among them.

When Jones flied out to center field for the third out of an uneventful first inning, you could have closed your eyes and pretended Edgar Renteria just looped up the middle in the bottom of the 11th inning in Game 7 of the 1997 World Series.

This was a Puerto Rican party from the start until the early, merciful ending, and there was more fun had at Dolphin Stadium on Saturday than there had been at any Marlins home game since the fall of 2003.

The only letdown, both for the stacked American team that actually has visions of winning this event and for the Puerto Rican fans who were by no means ready to end their festivities early, was the mercy-rule finish when the Americans fell behind by 10 runs in the bottom of the seventh inning.

Maybe now, with another loss meaning the end for the U.S. in this tournament, the next game will resemble an American fiesta when the U.S. takes on the WBC's Cinderella, the Netherlands, to avoid elimination Sunday (now would seem like an appropriate time to note the humor in the fact that there were two Dominican Republic tourism ads smack in the middle of the left-field scoreboards when that country was embarrassingly ousted by the Dutch in Round 1).

It never made much sense. At least not from afar. But watching from up close, you realize this thing might, in time, actually become a classic by more than name alone.

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