March is an exciting month to be a student at Binghamton University for a variety of reasons.

The weather initiates a transition toward a brighter shade of grey, however painfully slow the process may be. Parade Day allows us all the chance to pretend to be Irish on pretend St. Patrick’s Day, while many of us will also pretend to be of legal drinking age.

We welcome the month with arms wide open.

March isn’t a particularly bad time to be a sports fan, either. The most hyped tournament in all of sports, March Madness, gives a significant portion of viewers a reason to temporarily feign interest in college basketball.

For many, a college hoops bracket is their only taste of sports gambling to be had all year. The thrill is sweet, though short-lived in most cases. My bracket is invariably toast by the second day of the tournament.

This year, however, there’s another tournament worth considering that’ll share a portion of the country’s attention, albeit to a marginal extent, in the form of an international round-robin that’s set to take place on two continents, with games scheduled every day starting on March 2 and culminating on March 19.

The players on each team will not be representing a university, state or city. They’ll be playing for their home countries.

The 2013 World Baseball Classic is all but under way, inciting a collective “eh” from the American audience in response. The presentation of the international tournament encompassing the great American pastime says it all. All games will be televised on MLB Network. While preseason Major League Baseball games will be given the major sporting network spotlight on several occasions throughout the coming weeks, the WBC will be receiving the Thursday Night Football treatment.

Tsk-tsk.

If this isn’t enough to convince you that the tournament lacks any substantial nationalistic pride, vigor or marked enthusiasm, just take a look at the teams’ rosters. Here are a few names absent from Team USA’s roster: Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, Buster Posey, Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, David Price … I’ll stop here at the risk of exceeding the column’s word limit.

It’s evident that America isn’t the only culprit in this poorly conducted study in seriousness. Yu Darvish and Russell Martin are just a few names on a long list of high-caliber players who have also elected not to play for their home countries.

Johan Santana will refrain from representing his native Venezuela, a team that would’ve been extremely thin in the pitching rotation even with the help of the Cy Young Award winner. The next most capable starting arm on the team may belong to Henderson Alvarez or Carlos Zambrano … a chilling reality for the team’s fan base.

What’s truly bizarre is that the decision to abstain from the WBC did not rest in the hands of Santana himself, but rather the New York Mets’ front office. This is only one case among many over the past several months in which professional teams have denied the interest of players under contract in competing on the international stage.

It’s a pity that the WBC happens once every four years, only to devolve into a series of glorified spring training games. This is the most worthy substitute in baseball for Olympic competition, and it always seems to lack any serious intensity. A far cry from the World Cup, it’s a shame that what should be one of the greatest honors in baseball has turned into an inconvenience.