Round Two of the World Baseball Classic is being played this weekend in South Florida and San Diego. That may be news to the average baseball fan in the U.S., who relies on the mainstream media to inform him and whet his appetite for baseball.

The WBC is a very noble venture on the part of Major League Baseball, which sees it as a golden opportunity to build the game internationally by capitalizing on national pride and patriotism that can bubble to the surface in a global athletic competition, in this case in a baseball context.

Yet for all of MLB’s grand ambitions to broaden the game’s appeal beyond the boundaries of the United States, the event has been slow to resonate in this country in large part because the mainstream media has treated the WBC with equal parts apathy and cynicism. With each player defection in the weeks leading up to the event, whether voluntary or for reasons beyond the player’s control, it was more ammunition for the media to pile on and tell us how illegitimate the WBC was as a viable baseball attraction. Beyond the live game coverage that ESPN and the new MLB-TV network provided in Round One, there has been limited exposure—and, in some cases (as in my local newspaper), no coverage.

While tears of triumph flowed in one dugout, and tears of heartache flowed in the other following the stunning upset the other night by The Netherlands over the Dominican Republic; while the Dominican Republic, as a nation, went into mourning on the heels of its team’s sudden, dramatic departure from the tournament; while even Canada anguished over the disappointing showing of its entry in the tournament, the U.S. team advanced to the second round with little more than a collective yawn from its own media.

Maybe it’s the Canadian upbringing in me, but I am astonished that this country, where the game is a national pastime, has not gotten caught up in the magnitude of the WBC, which provides a rare chance to cheer on national heroes like Derek Jeter and Chipper Jones wearing the red, white and blue. Then again, it may be another case of the more things change . . . the more they stay the same.

As much as our grand old game tries to broaden its horizons, to reach out globally, it has again encountered a fickle national media that can be annoyingly liberal in its view on other topics, while showing little latitude to let baseball try a new, fresh idea without a heavy dose of indifference, suspicion or even scorn.

I launched Baseball America almost 30 years ago (from my home in Canada, no less) because I was increasingly disheartened by the indifferent way the mainstream media in the U.S. treated baseball at all levels of the game—other than the major leagues. Even The Sporting News, the revered national pulse of the game for decades, was scaling back on the depth of its baseball coverage and abandoning staple areas altogether, to the dismay of long-time readers who followed baseball at all levels.

It became evident immediately and was reinforced constantly over the 25-year period that I remained at Baseball America—as interest in minor league baseball skyrocketed; as interest in college baseball, in the draft, in prospect rankings, in summer baseball, in international baseball grew exponentially—that there is a much greater widespread interest in baseball, in areas of the game beyond the core major-league level, than what the mainstream media bothers to cover or allows us to enjoy.

Outside of the coverage provided in a few niche publications and websites, minor league baseball still gets little or no national coverage commensurate with the enormous growth it has experienced, as evidenced by record attendance figures in each of the last five years. Admittedly, minor-league games can be construed as glorified exhibition games, and unfortunately have been, because winning is de-emphasized in deference to developing talent for major league teams, but the national media has never embraced minor league baseball for what it is or come close to acknowledging that there must be something of value inherent in the sport to warrant drawing 40 million-plus fans to games each year.

The College World Series has become one of the most compelling sporting events—not just baseball events—on the calendar, mainly because ESPN has made it a spectacle deserving of national attention. Yet for all the charm and appeal of the College World Series, the mainstream media largely thumbs its nose at college baseball for all but 10 days in June. I’m curious also why ESPN can trip all over itself to cover the College World Series, yet essentially ignore the college game otherwise. Meanwhile, the networks and major cable providers embrace women’s college basketball to a vastly greater degree.

I have no problem with women’s college basketball receiving the exposure it does on its own merits, and acknowledge it thrives at schools like Connecticut and Tennessee, along with a few other college campuses around the country. It may also have better TV ratings generally than college baseball, but I attribute the superior ratings that basketball gets to the natural advantage it has of being the most visible sport that women play. College baseball is much farther down the pecking order for men. Yet I still have a difficult time believing women’s college basketball is a more popular sport than college baseball—certainly not to the degree that basketball deserves vastly superior media exposure than baseball gets.

Even the baseball draft has traditionally been underplayed by the media—though Major League Baseball must bear some of that responsibility for being so slow in recognizing the popularity of the draft. Prior to ESPN making a half-hearted effort to televise the draft in the last couple of years, it was astonishing how much interest the draft generated in the last few years I was at Baseball America, and also at MLB.com. Both entities experienced significantly more hits on the two days of the draft than on any other day of the year as the national media, predictably, largely ignored the draft.

And so it goes with almost every other level of the game. The lack of apparent respect that baseball engenders from the national media for select segments of its game is curious. And yet, ironically, the media often holds baseball to a higher standard than any other sport.

It will attack baseball (deservedly so, admittedly) for the way it allowed steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs to enter the game, particularly when MLB and the Player’s Association dragged their feet in addressing the issue. And yet, it never took professional football to task, to anywhere near the same degree, when it was painfully evident that the same issues were impacting that sport. It also closely scrutinizes and challenges baseball for its racial policies when baseball is the only sport, among all the major team sports in the U.S., that comes anywhere close to matching the number of African-Americans in Major League Baseball to the national average of African-Americans in our society as a whole.

This is the same media that unhesitatingly, unabashedly and short-sightedly proclaims the World Series champion each year as the World champion of baseball. While most of us believe the best and most competitive baseball in the world is played in the U.S., it is abjectly arrogant for the media or anyone to instantly crown a major-league team a World champion when the World Series is essentially a closed event, limited to 29 teams from the U.S. and one from Canada, and precludes teams from other nations from participating.

World champion? How about Japan, winner of the 2006 World Baseball Classic. The Japanese are more representative of being a true World champion than the Philadelphia Phillies because they won an open competition that involved 16 countries. Or how about Cuba, which routinely beats the U.S. each year in events that are far more representative of being true international competitions than the World Series?

In my role of editor at Baseball America, I would never allow the terms World Series champion and World champion to be used synonymously. Growing up in Canada, I recall the NHL’s Stanley Cup champion often being referred to as the World champion—but almost never did again after 1972, when Canada’s best met their match in an eight-game summit series against Russia, after previously believing the Canadian brand of hockey was vastly superior to that played by the Russians, or anywhere else in the world.

There is a similar perception in this country, festered by the media’s indifferent coverage of the World Baseball Classic, that baseball, as it is played in the U.S., is a vastly superior product than anywhere else in the world; that Major League Baseball is the only game in town that matters; that the game has little or no merit beyond the boundaries of the U.S., But the reality is that baseball is thriving in other countries around the World, that the gap in the level of competition between the U.S. and other countries is closing, that the number of foreigners playing Major League Baseball continues to rise.

Every other country in the competition has embraced the WBC as a legitimate world-wide competition in ways that the U.S. has not, and that stems largely from a media that hasn’t bought into the event, hasn’t seen fit to treat and respect baseball for the national pastime that it is, and has told us once again, in its own misguided way, what’s important and what’s not.

We may never know if the WBC will become a viable event in this country. It will be difficult for it to establish a foothold, to say the least, if the media chooses not to buy into the concept. For now, it’s a no-win situation. Should the U.S. win the competition, the media will almost certainly blow it off by saying it knew all along that the U.S. played the baseball in the world anyway, that it didn’t need a gimmicky competition in the heart of spring training to prove it. Should the U.S. lose, it will almost assuredly dismiss the event as being an unimportant exhibition.