Special Update - World Baseball Craptastic

Hutch brought up a point yesterday that the World Baseball Classic's rules for player eligibility were modeled after the FIFA World Cup, so I had to check it out. It's not that I didn't believe him, it's that, well, okay...I really didn't believe that for one second.

According to Major League Baseball, and I'm paraphrasing here, you can play for a country if your great-great-great grandmother f*cked an Italian once.

Now...with a little help from my friend Nancyb over at bigsoccer.com, I found two links that define eligibility for FIFA here and here.

According to both of these sites, in order to be eligible to compete internationally in soccer, you "shall be citizens of (its) country and subject to it's jurisdiction."

Going further, they state that "If a Player has more than one nationality (1), or if a Player acquires a new nationality (2), or if the Player is eligible to play for several Association teams due to his nationality (3), the following exceptions apply:

(a) Up to his 21st birthday, a player may only once request changing the Association for which he is eligible to play international matches.
A player may exercise this right to change Associations only if he has not played at "A" international level for his current Association and if at the time of his first full or partial appearance in an international match in an official competition of any other category, he already had such nationalities. ..."

In other words, A-Job and Piazza would not be permitted to play for the Dominican Republic and Italy because they aren't citizens of those respective nationalities.

However, at least in A-Job's case, were he to attain citizenship due to his parents being born in the Dominican Republic, he could only play for them provided he never represented the United States at a full international event (youth teams don't count.) He also can't have represented the U.S. in any other competition (basketball, rugby, whatever.)

As for Piazza, I don't know if his parent's were born in Italy or not. I know his dad, Vince, was childhood friends with Tommy Lasorda, who was born in Pennsylvannia in the 1920s. Piazza was born here as well, in 1968, which would mean that even if Piazza's parents were born in Italy, they were probably here for at least 30 years before Mike was born.

Did all that make sense?

Here is a soccer example: David Regis was a French-born soccer player who married an American whom he met while they were neighbors in Germany. He wasn't even an American citizen until a couple of months before the 1998 World Cup (which was played in France,) but was allowed to play for the U.S.A. in that tournament because he had attained citizenship and had never played a match for France at the "A'" level. Had he played on the French National Rugby team before he got married and became a U.S. citizen, he would still have been allowed to play for us. If he played for France after he became an American Citizen, he would not have been eligible.

Footnotes:
(1) parents who are citizens of two separate countries
(2) by marriage
(3) such as the case with South Africa offering dual-citizenship with England, or like Andruw Jones' home island of Curacao being part of the self-governing Netherlands Antilles, which are owned by the Kingdom of the Netherlands, aka Holland.