KOREA ROCKS

Pretty solid. I think they should contend pretty well. They walked into the second round with easy wins over Taiwan and China.

When I was in Tokyo ('99 to '01), the newspapers were filled with sports stories of the Japanese players in Major League Baseball. And when I visited Korea for a week, I learned that the sportswriters in that nation paid a good deal of attention to the Korean players competing in the Japan Baseball League. Of course, since that time, several players from Korea have entered (and succeeded in) Major League Baseball. This will be a quality squad. Not as strong as their neighbors from the Land of the Rising Sun, perhaps, but the Koreans could be sleepers. They have a competitive professional league on the Peninsula and they take baseball seriously.

Hee-Sop Choi is their only positional player on a Major League roster, but they do have a fair amount of pitchers who have had success in the US. Probably the second team to come out of Asia behind Japan.