Eleven years ago, I made the 320-mile drive from Southern California to Phoenix to see the U.S. play Canada in Pool C competition of the inaugural World Baseball Classic.

I should have stayed home.

Dontrelle Willis was torched and the U.S. lost 8-6 to Canada in the “world cup” of the stick-and-ball game.

Which it hasn’t been and is unlikely to become, but the WBC keeps lurching along, and tomorrow the fourth edition of the tournament begins, in South Korea.

(No, I will not be driving to Seoul.)

And I have only one question for organizers of the WBC.

Why bother?

The way this is supposed to work … is that “world championships” of a sport bring together the greatest players.

It is that way in most of the world’s biggest team sports — soccer, basketball, rugby, cricket, team handball …

But not in baseball.

It is a fatal flaw for the WBC.

It again is staging the event in March, concluding with the title game at Dodger Stadium on March 22. And early March is when all pitchers and lots of batters who play in summer professional leagues (like Major League Baseball) are anything but sharp.

Most of them are focused on getting ready for the competition that matters — with their club.

Players are so excited about the WBC that they have been avoiding it from the start.

We could create all-star teams of players who have chosen not to play.

Among those who would be on the U.S. 2017 “don’t care” all-stars would be Mike Trout, Kris Bryant, Mookie Betts, Clayton Kershaw, Bryce Harper, Chris Sale, Anthony Rizzo … I could go on, but here is the roster, and note the non-participation of your local American star ballplayers.

To make it easy for fans of the Cubs, Red Sox and Dodgers, three of the best teams in ball, exactly zero of their players are on the U.S. team.

A second issue that resists solving is that baseball doesn’t have 16 competitive national teams and, thus, when trying to fill a 16-team bracket some hapless/hopeless teams qualify.

Baseball’s idea, no doubt, is to try to spread the global popularity of the game, but it seems unlikely to do so because very few countries have serious baseball competition.

The international game has maybe eight competitive teams, and in alphabetical order they are: Cuba, Dominican Republic, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Puerto Rico, United States and Venezuela.

The rest are making up the numbers, as the Brits would say. Italy and Israel are in the 2017 WBC. So are China and Chinese Taipei and Colombia and Venezuela and Australia and the Netherlands.

The first week of the competition is shaking out the wheat from the chaff, and generally no more than one of the outsiders gets into the next round. Which will not change anytime soon.

The third major problem with the WBC is the nature of the game and its resistance to discovering a a true champion in so few games.

Baseball is about demonstrated superiority over a long span of time and games. It is 162 games in MLB, 144 games in Japan as well as South Korea, and so forth.

Yes, MLB in particular has watered down the “best meeting the best” with its expanded playoffs, which give four wild-card teams (and six division champions) a chance to win the World Series. But even those lesser teams have been pretty good over a span of six months.

The World Baseball Classic consists of 16 national teams playing three pool games each. Then eight disappear.

The top two in each of the four pools advance to two pool-play competitions, and then four more teams go away.

The four survivors meet in the semifinals. Thus, no one plays more than eight games. Which is not nearly enough to identify a legitimate champion.

In MLB, the “semifinalists” play a best-of-seven series — as do the finalists. Potentially 14 games.

If the WBC were played in the height of the summer by players in midseason form, contested by 16 strong teams culled from deep competition… well maybe we might pay attention.

As is, this baseball fan — and nearly all the rest — are more likely to follow spring training results than those coming from the WBC.