There is the usual gleaming sun in the skies over Florida and Arizona, but there’s a new shadow over the Grapefruit and Cactus leagues.

There’s a little less spring in spring training.

For a multitude of Marches, baseball fans could look to the south, and whatever delusions they cherished about the prospects of their own team – Happy April Fools’ Day, Cub fans – they could at least feel confident that one among those squads down there was the best baseball team in the world.

Now, it’s hard to be sure of that – unless you regularly check out the Japanese Pacific League.

This beanball of reality struck Americans earlier when the first World Baseball Classic was won by Japan, beating Cuba 10-6. Japan and Cuba reached the final game by defeating the Dominican Republic and South Korea, two other teams that don’t think every baseball game has to begin with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Ken Burns will not be making an eight-part documentary about this.

This was not a U.S. Olympic team of college ballplayers, arriving with a ready-made excuse. This was a team of top major league players, including the left side of the New York Yankees infield, two players with the annual income of a Cuban province.

At least we beat South Africa, with its proud baseball history going back to, maybe, October.

Admittedly, the U.S. team was missing some of the top Americans, such as Barry Bonds. Of course, using Barry Bonds in international competition might violate the chemical weapons treaty.

This outcome was not heartening for a country whose baseball season ends in what it likes to call the World Series – a competition now in danger of being renamed the United States Plus Toronto Series. Considering that the Fall Classic is the goal at the other end of spring training, you could see how Florida and Arizona might fall prey to March Malaise.

Not only did the United States fail to display international dominance, but it can’t even claim supremacy in North America. In the classic, it lost to both Canada and Mexico. Not only are we not world champions, we’re third in the NAFTA standings.

And the champion is not even the Dominican Republic, whose team was thick with major leaguers, but Japan, which had only two.

As Robert Whiting explained in his book on Japanese baseball, “You Gotta Have Wa.”

Say Wa?

Wa, wrote Whiting, literally means a kind of peace, but really conveys an immersion of the individual into something larger than himself. And while U.S. baseball players may be full of creatine, human growth hormone and injected testosterone, they seem to be low on Wa.

When Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners – who rescued something for American baseball by being both a major league all-star and a world champion – said before the semifinal game that he wanted to beat South Korea so badly it wouldn’t want to play Japan again for 30 years, it did seem a little, well, prewar.

But nobody could say it was pre-Wa.

That kind of feeling might explain why stadiums were full of dancing and chanting Japanese, Dominicans, Koreans and Mexicans, but generally relaxed Americans – and also explain why the championship turned out the way it did.

Of course, it still doesn’t explain how the U.S. team lost to Canada.

For the rest of spring training, baseball managers and players will answer questions about going all the way, meaning one day hoisting in their stadium a banner reading, “2006 World Champions.”

But maybe, just to be technically accurate, whoever wins the World Series should play the winner of the Wa Series.