VWBC To Recommence
VWBC
As the more observant people out there have surely noticed, there has been no news of the Vertissimoto World Baseball Championship since October of 2006. As readers may also be able to figure out, this means that the VWBC has been out of commission for nine whole months, a huge delay that dwarfs all the other ones which have so consistently plagued the tournament. The tale of how this happened is fairly lengthy and only mildly interesting, so it could very well be a waste of your time for me to tell it and you to read it. This, of course, will not prevent me in the slightest from telling it, and it will likely not prevent you from reading it either, so let's get on with it. Like so many similar bad things, the delay was due to the two main sources of evil in this world: communists and the french.
If we were to rewind time back to October 14, 2006, we would find a baseball world still chattering about Mongolia crunching Indonesia, and anxiously awaiting the semifinals of the VWBC, featuring two epic clashes between continental champions. However that night a shocking piece of news shattered the happy air. Franz Hatz, the pitcher whose amazing skill had been a large part of Liechtenstein's epic cinderella run, tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Although there had been several rounds of drug testing throughout the tournament, all players had come out negative in every single one, making for a tournament that was (up to that point) remarkably clean and fair. Hatz himself had been tested and passed twice. As the story broke the next day, commentators largely concurred that it was bound to happen sometime, but they expressed almost unanimous disappointment that it should come from a seemingly heroic man who led such an inspiring team. Hatz, meanwhile, vehemently denied the allegations, steadfastly insisting that he had taken no drugs.
At first it appeared that the incident, while scandalous, would not derail the competition. Hatz was ejected and banned from the tournament. Members of the English team that Liechtenstein had just eliminated made angry pronouncements about cheating, but took no more substantial action than that. The next day, however, two more Liechtenstein players received positive test results, including their offensive leader, Joseph Von Straten. England was enraged, and within hours the British Baseball Federation, which carries considerable clout because England and Scotland (two powerful teams) are members, angrily revoked its approval of the VWBC. This greatly decreased the tournament's credibility, which was previously unprecedented because it had the approval of all the various baseball organizations around the world. The very next day, an English team member tested positive, as did three Australians. This provoked the American Baseball League, another organization with huge clout to indignantly revoke their approval in protest because the USA, its premier member nation, had been defeated by the Australians. In the following days, several more positive tests were released, and league after league withdrew approval from the flailing tournament, until only two unimportant leagues still approved of the tournament. Although every single player denied any drug involvement, the VWBC had been rutted by a deep-running doping scandal, and with its credibility utterly destroyed, it looked to be heading for an inglorious end.
However, everything was not as it seemed. The only person who realized that something might be wrong was a top VWBC security official named Roger Vygrass. Vygrass sensed that it wasn't logical that so many tests should be positive when all of the subjects had come up negative before, and that all the players should be found out at the same time. So he assembled a team of highly skilled VWBC security personnel and set off to see if he could uncover anything. He started by poring over records of what the accused players had done in the past days, and soon found a strange connection. All of the accused players had eaten with people of French nationality shortly before their tests came back positive. So Vygrass and his team began watching prominent members of French baseball who had dined with the accused players. They began to catch occasional snatches about "the plot" or "our triumph". Vygrass and his team went to France, where they put several key Frenchies under extensive surveillance. After 8 months of painstakingly gathering evidence, Vygrass had uncovered an epic plot. It seemed that the French, who had been annihilated in the first round, decided that if they couldn't win the tournament, no one could. High-up people in the French baseball organization had paid a huge sum of money to KGB scientists for a substance that is odorless and tasteless but shows up exactly like steroids in drug tests. These scientists were working for the undercover communist regime that is gathering power, silently waiting to reclaim Russia, and the French had just funded their effort in addition to everything else. They had then slipped this substance into the food of the accused players, causing the pandemonium that derailed the VWBC.
Vygrass brought his case back to VWBC organizers, who had long since called off the tournament. They were ecstatic at a chance to revive the VWBC, so they assembled a sort of "baseball court" of representatives from the participating federations. This assembly examined Vygrass's evidence, found it conclusive, and unanimously reapproved the tournament and voted to restart it. France was banned from all future Vertissimoto-sponsored events and ejected from the European Baseball Coalition. The VWBC semifinals are set to be announced very soon, so stay tuned.
As the more observant people out there have surely noticed, there has been no news of the Vertissimoto World Baseball Championship since October of 2006. As readers may also be able to figure out, this means that the VWBC has been out of commission for nine whole months, a huge delay that dwarfs all the other ones which have so consistently plagued the tournament. The tale of how this happened is fairly lengthy and only mildly interesting, so it could very well be a waste of your time for me to tell it and you to read it. This, of course, will not prevent me in the slightest from telling it, and it will likely not prevent you from reading it either, so let's get on with it. Like so many similar bad things, the delay was due to the two main sources of evil in this world: communists and the french.
If we were to rewind time back to October 14, 2006, we would find a baseball world still chattering about Mongolia crunching Indonesia, and anxiously awaiting the semifinals of the VWBC, featuring two epic clashes between continental champions. However that night a shocking piece of news shattered the happy air. Franz Hatz, the pitcher whose amazing skill had been a large part of Liechtenstein's epic cinderella run, tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Although there had been several rounds of drug testing throughout the tournament, all players had come out negative in every single one, making for a tournament that was (up to that point) remarkably clean and fair. Hatz himself had been tested and passed twice. As the story broke the next day, commentators largely concurred that it was bound to happen sometime, but they expressed almost unanimous disappointment that it should come from a seemingly heroic man who led such an inspiring team. Hatz, meanwhile, vehemently denied the allegations, steadfastly insisting that he had taken no drugs.
At first it appeared that the incident, while scandalous, would not derail the competition. Hatz was ejected and banned from the tournament. Members of the English team that Liechtenstein had just eliminated made angry pronouncements about cheating, but took no more substantial action than that. The next day, however, two more Liechtenstein players received positive test results, including their offensive leader, Joseph Von Straten. England was enraged, and within hours the British Baseball Federation, which carries considerable clout because England and Scotland (two powerful teams) are members, angrily revoked its approval of the VWBC. This greatly decreased the tournament's credibility, which was previously unprecedented because it had the approval of all the various baseball organizations around the world. The very next day, an English team member tested positive, as did three Australians. This provoked the American Baseball League, another organization with huge clout to indignantly revoke their approval in protest because the USA, its premier member nation, had been defeated by the Australians. In the following days, several more positive tests were released, and league after league withdrew approval from the flailing tournament, until only two unimportant leagues still approved of the tournament. Although every single player denied any drug involvement, the VWBC had been rutted by a deep-running doping scandal, and with its credibility utterly destroyed, it looked to be heading for an inglorious end.
However, everything was not as it seemed. The only person who realized that something might be wrong was a top VWBC security official named Roger Vygrass. Vygrass sensed that it wasn't logical that so many tests should be positive when all of the subjects had come up negative before, and that all the players should be found out at the same time. So he assembled a team of highly skilled VWBC security personnel and set off to see if he could uncover anything. He started by poring over records of what the accused players had done in the past days, and soon found a strange connection. All of the accused players had eaten with people of French nationality shortly before their tests came back positive. So Vygrass and his team began watching prominent members of French baseball who had dined with the accused players. They began to catch occasional snatches about "the plot" or "our triumph". Vygrass and his team went to France, where they put several key Frenchies under extensive surveillance. After 8 months of painstakingly gathering evidence, Vygrass had uncovered an epic plot. It seemed that the French, who had been annihilated in the first round, decided that if they couldn't win the tournament, no one could. High-up people in the French baseball organization had paid a huge sum of money to KGB scientists for a substance that is odorless and tasteless but shows up exactly like steroids in drug tests. These scientists were working for the undercover communist regime that is gathering power, silently waiting to reclaim Russia, and the French had just funded their effort in addition to everything else. They had then slipped this substance into the food of the accused players, causing the pandemonium that derailed the VWBC.
Vygrass brought his case back to VWBC organizers, who had long since called off the tournament. They were ecstatic at a chance to revive the VWBC, so they assembled a sort of "baseball court" of representatives from the participating federations. This assembly examined Vygrass's evidence, found it conclusive, and unanimously reapproved the tournament and voted to restart it. France was banned from all future Vertissimoto-sponsored events and ejected from the European Baseball Coalition. The VWBC semifinals are set to be announced very soon, so stay tuned.
posted by theGbomb at 12:54 PM
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