01:00 AM EST on Friday, March 3, 2006

After years of planning and promoting, the World Baseball Classic finally got under way late last night, with Korea meeting Chinese Taipei at the Tokyo Dome in a game that began at 10 o'clock (noon today in Japan).

Japan, the favorite in the four-team pool, was to play China in a game that was scheduled for 4:30 a.m.

Play in the other four-team brackets begins Tuesday.

"I think people are going to find that having meaningful baseball in March and combining nationalism with national pride with baseball is a pretty powerful combination," said Paul Archey, senior vice president of Major League Baseball International and a key organizer of the 18-day event.

Archey said he expects sellouts for Japan's three games in Tokyo, and ticket sales for the tournament as a whole could top 800,000, matching attendance figures for last month's Olympics.

Japanese manager Sadaharu Oh said his team, which is led by All-Star outfielder Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners, will play typical Japanese "small ball."

Japan will be challenged by a Korean team heavy in pitching, with Chan Ho Park, Byung-Hyun Kim and Sunny Kim having combined to pitch in 748 major-league games and going 155-132.

Five of the 16 teams in the tourney will have advertisements on their uniforms.

Japan, China and Taiwan will have ads for soft drinks made by Asahi, the commissioner's office said yesterday. Venezuela will have ads for Maltin Polar, a nonalcoholic malt drink, and Panama will have ads for the Cable & Wireless telecommunications company. The patches on the jerseys will be approximately 4 inches by 4 inches, major-league baseball said.

In addition, Japan will have ads on its helmets for Konami, a Japanese entertainment corporation that develops video games.

The decision to have uniform ads was first reported by ESPN.com.