Orlando, Fla. ? Where’s the booing?

Where’s the hissing?

Where’s the outrage?

Don’t know if you noticed last week, but our U.S. baseball team disgraced itself in front of the world, failing to qualify for the final weekend of the World Baseball Classic.

So I’m wondering why U.S. fans aren’t worked up about the baseball team’s flop like they were when the U.S. basketball team was taught a humbling lesson in Athens at the 2004 Summer Olympics.

And by comparison, the Americans’ collapse in the WBC was far worse. This was our commissioner’s baby. It was played in our country, at our venues.

So if you thought taking home the bronze medal in basketball was humiliating, then surely our baseball team deserves to be force-fed countless episodes of Courting Alex after its WBC flame-out.

Canada, South Korea and Mexico stumped the United States. Or rather, stomped it.

How in the world could our baseball team lose to Canada? It was the Canadians that nearly lost to South Africa, who we pounded 17-zip.

Even worse, Canada’s starting second baseman is someone named Stubby Clap.

Stubby punked us.

Remember how in 2004 our country’s basketball fundamentals were said to have gone the way of 20 percent of all Sopranos characters?

Well, things are much worse in baseball. Kids aren’t flocking to the sport. Their parents are having a hard time supporting it because they don’t know how to explain the cream and the clear.

Bud Selig is worried about baseball’s worldwide growth, but he should be more concerned about its growth in the United States.

No matter what anyone thinks, we’re still far enough ahead of the rest of the world in basketball. Maybe not as far ahead as we were when we blasted teams with the original Dream Team, but the distance is still fairly comfortable.

You can’t say the same thing about baseball. The Koreans, Japanese, Dominicans, Venezuelans and Cubans are superior.

The penance for our idolization of home runs is seeing that the world has passed us by in the sport we invented.

“I tell you one thing: I like the way the other countries have absolutely rallied around each other, and you can see that the talent pool is so great worldwide,” said Braves pitcher John Smoltz, who declined pitching for Team USA because of health concerns. “You can just see the intensity that other countries have brought to it.”

The U.S. blamed the timing of the WBC, the other players’ better conditioning, and fear of injury for our pitiful display when, in fact, the real truth is we are no longer good enough to just show up and beat people.

“We tend to be focused on our teams here and that’s it,” Smoltz argued. “It’s just a different mindset.”

We need to learn from what happened in Athens and get serious about the WBC since it’s obviously not going anywhere.

It took a bronze in basketball to spur us into putting together a real team for this summer’s world championships and the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

After this debacle in the WBC, the U.S. should cease with the excuses and the complaining and have some national pride.

“You have a team of men and not of names,” Team Cuba Manager Higinio Velez told reporters. “You have to defend the flag of your country. You have to defend your homeland, the love for your country. The star is the team, and the team is what constitutes a star.”

Velez gets it, but will we?