If the 2026 World Baseball Classic is suffering from anything, it is expectation. Three years ago, the WBC ended on a note near-impossible to surpass: two teammates and future Hall of Famers facing each other in a deciding at-bat, and victory cinched by the most exciting baseball player in history. The standard now is not necessarily that the WBC will end in the same dramatic fashion, but that the success of the previous display would improve future renditions. Sure, 2023 boasted several star-studded rosters, but it could become a true best-on-best showing, with the participation to cement the WBC as a serious enterprise.
Which makes each piece of slightly negative news about this year’s WBC participation feel like a knock against the tournament’s hard-earned legitimacy. First, there are the insurance-related issues barring some stars from participation, after several big names were injured during the 2023 WBC. Puerto Rico was especially gutted, with Francisco Lindor and Carlos Correa only two of their eight players initially deemed unable to participate, despite Bad Bunny’s best efforts.
That would already be enough to give the competition a slight aroma del ratón Miguelito, but worse than the uninsured are the seeming shirkers. It is one thing for players to be forcefully barred from attendance; it is another for them to appear uncommitted to the cause. Tarik Skubal has became an example of the latter, as a participant who is just barely a participant. The Detroit Tigers ace is one of the best pitchers in baseball, coming off his second consecutive AL Cy Young award–winning year. He is also in a contract year, which explains why his only planned WBC appearance for Team USA, at least according to Bob Nightengale, will be to throw 55 likely unnecessary pitches against Great Britain before returning to spring training. (It is unclear where Atlanta’s Jurikson Profar getting suspended for PEDs, the second time he has done so within the past year, and thus being barred from playing for the Netherlands, fits into this dialectic.)
But the idea that quality portends seriousness has always struck me as misunderstanding the order of operations. People care about events not because those events have suddenly, within a vacuum, begun to matter; rather, the quality or what-have-you of an event is (largely) irrelevant so long as people have chosen to care about it. That is, the WBC will be a serious enterprise as long as viewers and players alike can believe that it is a serious enterprise, and if Aaron Judge speechifying as Captain America is any indication (or even the half-participation of Skubal in a contract year), the mirage will hold so long as the event itself delivers.
If there is a knock against the WBC it is that of the potential sourness of any international sports competition at this stage. Israel is participating. Should the United States, the obvious favorite, win, there is an unfortunately high likelihood of a Trumpian figure—a preening administration goon or just a run-of-the-mill MAGA baseball chud—sticking his nose in. Then again, the WBC boasts a more expansive definition of qualified national representation than the Olympics, which at times makes country lines, outside of the U.S., blurred. Like, say, seeing Jazz Chisholm Jr. captain Great Britain’s team via his birth in the Bahamas, a British Commonwealth nation. The concept of Captain Chisholm Jr. is admittedly amusing, but not particularly unique; Team Netherlands similarly carries long hallmarks of colonization, as players from Curaçao, Saint Maarten, and Aruba—like Xander Bogaerts—have long represented the Dutch in international competition
For all that the final moment of the 2023 WBC was defined by its sheer star power, what sold the tournament in the lead-up had little to do with that. No one who watched during the last rotation should fixate on Skubal’s participation or lack thereof. The WBC is, primarily, for the strangers, the unlikely heroes. It’s for the Lars Nootbaars of yesteryear and, I suppose, the Italian Aaron Nolas of today. Before getting to the best-on-best match-ups, you still have to, or get to, bear witness to what will happen to Italy, Brazil, and Australia—which is staffed, impressively, almost entirely with players born in Australia. The all-day experience of spring-training baseball is emulated to its extremes via timezone: The first game of WBC play, between Taiwan and Australia, will take place at 10 p.m. ET tonight.
In an exhibition between Puerto Rico and the Boston Red Sox yesterday, the Red Sox spotted the hamstrung Puerto Rican team a few players. One of them, a minor leaguer named Erik Riviera, received a mound visit while pitching for Puerto Rico and still wearing his Red Sox uniform. There’s nothing more baseball than that.