The World Baseball Classic is officially back! We’re been running preview content for the last two weeks, but now that the tournament is actually underway, you’ve got to pick a team to root for. You may even have to pick one team from each of the four pools. To help you choose a your favorite, I’ll be offering a reason to cheer for each of the 20 teams in the field. This is our last installment. Click the links below to read the previous entries:

Pool B – Pool C – Pool D

Brazil

Brazil is the clear underdog of Pool B. The team has got a tough road ahead of it, and its roster doesn’t feature a single major leaguer. What it does have, though, is pedigree. If you’ve watched Field of Dreams enough times to believe that baseball is the game of fathers and sons, then this is the team for you. Brazil boasts Joseph Contreras (the son of José Contreras), Lucas Ramirez (the son of Manny Ramirez), and Dante Bichette Jr. (you’ll never guess who his dad is). Also, in its final qualifier, Brazil defeated Germany, hanging a loss on pitcher Jaden Agassi, son of tennis legends Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf.

Now 33, Bichette was a first-round pick of the Yankees back in 2011. He last played affiliated ball in 2019, and he’s now training youth ballplayers in Los Angeles. He may have another gear when suiting up for Brazil. He batted .375 in the qualifiers, and back in the 2016 WBC, he went 4-for-10 in three games with a double, a triple, and two walks.

Ramirez is just 19. The Angels drafted him in the 17th round in 2024. Last year, he earned a promotion to High-A after running a 115 wRC+ in the complex league. He may not be the second coming of his father just yet, but he did have a 12% walk rate in the complex, too. Despite his youth, he batted .385 in the qualifiers.

Contreras is the most exciting son on the team. The 17-year-old right-hander is the youngest player in the entire tournament. He’s a high-school senior who’s committed to Vanderbilt, though that commitment may well get tested. He’s already listed at 6-foot-4, just like his dad, and he’s a serious prospect. “He has legitimate first-round upside,” wrote Mark Chiarelli of Baseball America, which ranked Contreras 34th in its preseason draft rankings. He can touch 98 mph with his fastball, which sits 92-96. He also throws a vulcan-grip forkball and a mid-80s slider that Chiarelli said “flashes plus.” Contreras didn’t play in the qualifiers last year, because, uh, he was 16. Next year, he’ll be old enough to vote, but Friday night, he may well be facing off against Aaron Judge.

Great Britain

How times have changed. Three years ago, the story for Great Britain was all about Harry Ford, the 20-year-old catching phenom with the big bat. He’d hit. 455 with three home runs in three games during the qualifiers. Then, in the actual WBC, fresh off batting .413 in the Arizona Fall League, he batted .308 with two homers and a double in four games.

Today, a fair bit of Ford’s prospect shine has faded. He’s still just 23, plenty young for a catcher, but he was blocked by Cal Raleigh in Seattle, so he was traded to the Nationals during the offseason. But let’s not forget that he’s likely to become Washington’s primary catcher, and he’s still the 74th-ranked prospect in the game, with 50 future values across every tool category. He’s athletic, he’s got a great approach at the plate, and he’s improved his receiving enough that he should be an average defender. He’s about to sink or swim in the majors.

Ford could absolutely be the star of this team again, but he’s got more company this year. Joining him are major leaguers like Tristan Beck, Trayce Thompson, and Nate Eaton (who should really be pitching in this tournament, if you ask me), along with a host of minor leaguers. The 38-year-old Vance Worley is back for one last ride, nine years removed from his final major league appearance. But Great Britain also has a genuine star in Jazz Chisholm Jr. The Bahamian Bomber is fresh off a 2025 season in which he set career highs with 31 home runs and 4.4 WAR. This could be his team now.

Italy

Maybe this is because I just wrote a whole article about Jac Caglianone, but the obvious reason to root for Team Italy is because it’s fun to walk around your house pronouncing all the names the way you imagine an actual Italian speaker would pronounce them. Will I be cheering as hard as I can for Gordon Graceffo? You bet I will.

Team Italy has a solid roster with enough major league regulars to fill out a whole lineup. But I’m still in it for the big boys. You know who I mean: Caglianone and his fellow Royal Vinnie Pasquantino, the 6-foot-3 Italian Nightmare himself. The 6-foot-4 Caglianone already has some nicknames – Cags, Jachtani, JacHammer, and the Vacuum, according to Baseball Reference – and for that matter, Jac is a nickname, too. But I think we can agree that we haven’t found a winner yet, and we definitely haven’t found one that makes the most of his Italian heritage.

For now, we’ll just call him the Italian Daymare. Is it derivative? Very much so. Is it terrible? Yes, it’s that, too. But do the math here. The Pasquatch (man, that guy has a lot of good nicknames) haunts you during the evening hours. The Cagsquatch (just go with it) haunts you during the daytime. It’s 24 hours of terror. You’ve got nowhere to hide. When will you get your precious restorative sleep? Every time you close your eyes you see two hulking lefties with plus bat speed sending flaming fragments of a baseball over the right field wall. Together, they’re a listed 495 pounds of panic (or 225 kilos, if you’re in Italy).

Mexico

Look, as long as Randy Arozarena is playing for Team Mexico, Randy Arozarena is the reason to be excited about Team Mexico. The Cuba native has always come up huge under the bright lights, and he takes playing for his adopted country very seriously. He has a career 162 wRC+ in the playoffs, and in the 2023 WBC, he batted .450 with nine RBI in just six games. You might also recall that he crossed his arms kind of a lot.

Arozarena is by no means the only fun player on the team. Andrés Muñoz’s cat is a social media star, and Team Mexico leads the WBC in players named Nacho. More importantly, it also leads in diminutive players who have entertaining running styles.

Alek Thomas is 5-foot-9, and his short legs seem to churn up the outfield grass when he tracks down a ball in the gap. The 6-foot Jarren Duran always plays at 100%, and his bandy-legged gait and full-body tilt when he turns a corner have earned him the nickname, “The Lizard.” It’s a joy to watch the 5-foot-8 Alejandro Kirk motor around the bases. As a bonus, both Duran and Kirk have severe cases of karate chop hands when they run. Still, none of them does this.

United States

Aaron Judge has taken some heat for the lackluster speech he gave to his teammates earlier this week, but not all of this was Judge’s fault. First, it wasn’t his idea. Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes pushed him to make the address in spite of his legendary ability to speak to the media without saying anything at all. Second, even if the speech had been a bit more substantive and delivered with a modicum of intonation, the setting wasn’t exactly conducive to rousing oratory. Everything about it felt artificial. The team was in full uniforms, plus sneakers. Judge was addressing his teammates in some sort of conference room with a wall of officials and reporters behind him and a cameraman snapping away. He wasn’t even standing in front of the team. He was off to the side of the room, and studies have proven that it’s physically impossible to be whipped into a frenzy while developing a crick in your neck.

More important than the context, though, is that people are misinterpreting the content. Here’s Judge’s grand finale:

So sacrifice for your family at home, you’re sacrificing for your country, and you’re sacrificing for the brothers in the trenches with you every single day. And that’s one thing I want us to do, fellas. I want to die on that field with you. We’re down, we’re beat up a little bit, man? Lean into each other, man. We’re going to lay it all on the line. And if we do that, we’re bringing the gold home.

Critics have interpreted Judge’s words as a military analogy, which would have been both crass and colossally tone deaf considering what the United States military is doing at this very moment. They’ve wondered what exactly these superstars are sacrificing, aside from a couple weeks of spring training. They’ve wondered whether the winner of the WBC now gets gold medals, too, or whether Judge just spent too much time watching the Olympics.

The critics have it wrong. Judge wasn’t channeling Henry V. That was just a metaphor and a clever bit of double entendre. He was actually talking strategy. Team USA is going to sacrifice its way through this tournament. Since it seems to have gone over so many heads already, let me lay out the Cliff’s Notes for you:

So sacrifice [bunt] for your family at home, you’re sacrificing [flies] for your country, and you’re sacrificing [more bunts] for the brothers in the trenches [fancy word for dugout] with you every single day. And that’s one thing I want us to do, fellas. I want [our bunts] to die on that field with you. We’re down, we’re beat up a little bit, man? Lean into [inside pitches and get hit], man. We’re going to lay it all [our bodies, and also all the bunts] on the line. And if we do that [hit and run], we’re bringing the gold [still unclear] home.

Get it now? Judge and his comrades-in-bats are going to lay bunts on the line. They’re going to safety squeeze and suicide squeeze. They’re going to give away outs like nobody’s business. Manager Mark DeRosa assembled a monster lineup of power hitting superstars as a colossal fake out. They’re going to small ball their way to… some sort of gold something. And even though Judge announced it in a speech, the world will never see it coming.

The World Baseball Classic is officially back! We’re been running preview content for the last two weeks, but now that the tournament is actually underway, you’ve got to pick a team to root for. You may even have to pick one team from each of the four pools. To help you choose a your favorite, I’ll be offering a reason to cheer for each of the 20 teams in the field. We started with Pool C and Pool D yesterday. Pool B will run later today.

Canada

The big reason to root for Canada is that this might finally be the year the team breaks through and makes it to the knockout round. With Puerto Rico at the top, Pool A is by no means a cakewalk, but the second spot doesn’t have a hands-down favorite. Baseball America’s power rankings have Canada ranked seventh in the tournament, with Cuba ninth, Colombia 14th, and Panama 16th. Canada’s outfield is going to be really fun. Let’s break it down.

Right Field: When healthy, Tyler O’Neill is a human mountain who hits majestic dingers. (When not healthy, he’s still a human mountain, just without the dingers.) O’Neill had an ugly 2025 season, getting into just 54 games for the Orioles (due to not healthy) and running a wRC+ of 93. However, the underlying numbers weren’t bad at all. He posted a paltry .218 BABIP and a robust .360 xwOBA, the second-highest mark of his career. The small sample size is messing with us here. O’Neill is just one year removed from a 2024 season in which he launched 31 home runs with a 133 wRC+, and he’s raked in spring training. He also batted .615 in the 2023 WBC. Watch out.

Center Field: O’Neill was once a plus defender, but age and injuries have slowed him down, and his numbers in recent years aren’t great. Luckily, Denzel Clarke can cover for him. Denzel Clarke can cover everything. The A’s center fielder has a weak bat, but you could make a strong argument that he was the best defensive outfielder in baseball last year. According to Statcast, his 11 fielding runs ranked 30th among all outfielders, even though his 383 2/3 innings played ranked 123rd. On a per-inning basis, no one could touch him.

Left Field: We’ve got more power in the corners. Marlins prospect Owen Caissie just came in at 62 on our Top 100 Prospects list. Last year with the Cubs, he struck out a whopping 41% of the time in his brief major league debut, but he also launched 22 homers in 99 games at Triple-A Iowa. The 23-year-old Caissie is going to make loud contact or whiff big. Either way, it’ll be fun to watch. Should we finish with some gratuitous Denzel Clarke highlights? Of course we should.

Colombia

If you want to root for the team that’s most likely to have a pitcher take a deep breath and say, “I’m getting too old for this sh*t,” then Colombia is your squad. The team features the starting pitching duo of Jose Quintana and Julio Teheran. The 37-year-old Quintana made his major league debut in 2012, and he’ll be suiting up for the Rockies this season. Teheran is a mere 35, but he debuted for the Braves in 2011 at the tender age of 20. He spent 2025 in the Mexican League and is currently a free agent. If he pitches well, he could earn one last ride. Together, Quintana and Teheran have played for 11 different major league teams and made more than 600 major league starts. Their backs must be killing them.

Neither pitcher appeared in the 2023 WBC, but both pitched brilliantly in 2017, giving up one run apiece in their respective starts. Teheran won his, but Quintana earned a no-decision as Colombia went on to lose in extra innings. This team also has a real shot here. Colombia will definitely be relying on experience more than youth – I didn’t even mention the 38-year-old Donovan Solano – but Pool A is pretty wide open, and the team allowed just one run during its three-game qualifiers. How time flies.

Cuba

Once again, it’s all about the arms. Cuba is without several prominent major leaguers, but the roster may well have enough pitching to make it work anyway. We have to start with the 30-year-old Livan Moinelo, who plays in Japan for the SoftBank Hawks. The southpaw debuted in Japan in 2018, and he looked fine in his first season. Then he turned into one of the best pitchers in the league. Pitching in relief, he ran a 1.32 ERA and a 1.80 FIP from 2019 to 2023. That’s five years, and his ERA never rose above 1.69! In 2023, he put up a 0.98 ERA despite an elbow issue and a hip injury that required surgery after the season. Naturally, at that point, SoftBank decided to turn him into a starter. Risky move with a guy who’s coming off surgery and just put up a sub-one ERA, right? Don’t worry. Over the past two years as a starter, Moinelo is 23-8 with a combined ERA of 1.67. He’s fun to watch, too. He’s listed at just 5-foot-10 and 154 pounds. He features a four-pitch mix with a big, loopy curveball he’s not afraid to locate in the strike zone and a sneaky mid-90s fastball that seems to jump out of his hand.

If that’s not enough, can I interest you in Raidel Martínez, who spent the first 10 years of his career with the Chunichi Dragons and is now with the Yomiuri Giants? Martínez is in some ways the opposite of Moinelo. He’s a lanky right-handed closer with a career 1.99 ERA in NPB. The last time he ran an ERA above 2.00 was 2021. In 2023, he allowed just two runs in 48 appearances. He posted a 0.39 ERA. Over the past two years, he has a combined 89 saves. Maybe he should try starting.

Last, you might be familiar with Yariel Rodríguez, who put up a 3.08 ERA across 66 appearances for the Blue Jays last year. Thanks to an ugly walk rate, his peripherals weren’t as rosy, and he got lit up in the playoffs. Still his fastball touches the upper 90s.

Panama

On Wednesday, MLB.com published an article titled “World Baseball Classic partners with more than 150 brands from around the world.” Did you know that there was an entity called World Baseball Classic, Inc.? I’m betting you didn’t, because nothing kills the romance of a big worldwide sporting event like contemplating the filthy lucre that makes the whole thing run. And yet, right there on MLB.com, nestled among stories about thrilling prospects and grizzled managers and sibling connections, is a press release trumpeting the triumph of corporate synergy that is the WBC. What does this have to do with Panama? Well, I’m writing up different reasons to root for 20 different teams, and I figured with 150 different corporate partners around the world, at least one of them deserved to be rooted for. So I just picked one.

Congratulations, Panama. Sure, we will be cheering for old friends like Christian Bethancourt and Rubén Tejada and exciting prospects like Enrique Bradfield Jr., but mostly we will be cheering for your jersey sponsor, Caja de Ahorros, which is a bank.

Let’s go Caja de Ahorros! Who wants a checking account? Loans for everybody! Panama means business.

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico has one of the better rosters in the tournament, but it’s hard to talk about this team without talking about what might have been. The insurance providers for the WBC refused to insure at least eight different Puerto Rican players, including stars Carlos Correa, José Berríos, Victor Caratini, and Francisco Lindor, citing an increased injury risk. One imagines that the actuaries at the insurance companies threw a small, sad breakroom party with soda and mini cupcakes when they found out that Lindor had injured himself anyway. That all this happened right before the tournament started added insult to injury, and the team considered pulling out altogether. It’s not all that often that you get to combine two truly rewarding passions: rooting for a baseball team and heaping scorn on insurance companies, so you should really grab this opportunity while you can.

If you’re looking for a more positive reason to cheer for Puerto Rico, look no further than the catcher position. Without Caratini, Team Puerto Rico is running out 39-year-old Martín Maldonado and 35-year-old Christian Vázquez. These two share more than just a position, an advanced age, and a place of birth. They’re both no-bat catchers who don’t grade out well according to the advanced defensive metrics. They’re still playing regularly because wherever they go, their team believes they’re bringing the intangibles. It’s Nichols’ Law of Catcher Defense in action at a global scale, and Maldonado and Vázquez are playing their trade under manager Yadier Molina. Can vibes-based catching take Puerto Rico to a championship? Maybe, but only if you believe hard enough.

The World Baseball Classic is officially back! We’re been running preview content for the last several weeks, but now that the tournament is actually underway, you’ve got to pick a team to root for. You may even want to pick one team from each of the four pools. To help you decide on your favorite, I’ll be offering a reason to cheer for each of the 20 teams in the field. We started with Pool C earlier today, and we’ll run Pools A and B tomorrow.

Dominican Republic

Listing teams alphabetically has us starting with the powerhouse of the group. How’s this for a lineup?

C: Austin Wells
1B: Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
2B: Ketel Marte
SS: Geraldo Perdomo
3B: Manny Machado
LF: Juan Soto
CF: Julio Rodríguez
RF: Fernando Tatis Jr.
DH: Junior Caminero
P: Cristopher Sánchez

This isn’t just a lineup without any weak spots. It’s a dream team, and it still leaves stars like Jeremy Peña and Oneil Cruz on the bench!

The real reason to root for the Dominican Republic, though, is that they’ll be out for revenge. They won the 2013 WBC, but in 2023, losses to Venezuela and Puerto Rico left them 2-2 in pool play, and the run differential tiebreaker kept them from advancing. The Dominican Republic didn’t even make it out of pool play! Manager Rodney Linares heard about it in a big way. Albert Pujols is at the helm now, and he knows he’s got to do better.

Pool D is a bit softer this time around, with the Netherlands taking the place of Puerto Rico, but the this team might not care. They’re out for blood, and it’s not hard to envision them going scorched earth and running up the run differential as much as they can. With that lineup, they’ll have more than enough firepower. They just hung 12 runs on the Tigers on Tuesday. If what you’re looking for in a WBC team is a high likelihood that watching them play will feel similar to watching a Rambo movie, then the Dominican Republic is your squad.

Israel

Look, I don’t know if we’re going to see Robert Stock pitch, or how much he’ll throw even if we do, but he’s the kind of guy you cheer for. I wrote an article about his journey last year, but it’s worth digging even deeper, because it really puts the “World” in “World Baseball Classic.” No less an authority than Baseball America named Stock the best 13-year-old player in the country in 2003, the best 14-year-old player in 2004, and then the overall Youth Player of the Year in 2005. “The 6-foot, 180-pound 15-year-old was tossing 90-mph fastballs by the time he was 14 and has been known to connect on 400-foot home runs, using a wood bat,” wrote Alan Matthews. Stock enrolled at USC as both a catcher and a pitcher so that he could become draft eligible when he was 19.

The Cardinals took him in the second round in 2009, but things were a lot harder in the pros. After three years of trying to make it as a catcher, Stock switched back to pitching. After three more years, Stock still hadn’t advanced to Double-A, and the Cardinals released him. He bounced to the Astros, then the Pirates, then the Reds, and finally to the Padres, who finally promoted him to the big leagues in 2018. Still armed with an upper-90s fastball as a 28-year-old rookie, Stock made the most of the chance. He ran a 2.50 ERA and 2.71 FIP across 32 appearances and 39 2/3 innings.

The success was fleeting. Stock struggled in 2019 and kept bouncing, to the Phillies, the Red Sox, the Cubs, and the Mets. In 2022, he landed with the Doosan Bears of the KBO as a starter, running a 3.60 ERA and earning another shot despite running a 11.5% walk rate. He went to Driveline, started 2023 pitching for Israel in the WBC and reported to Triple-A Nashville on a minor league deal with the Brewers, but after just three starts, Milwaukee let him go. He finished the season with the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League.

Stock threw a no-hitter in Long Island, but his overall numbers weren’t great. He spent 2024 pitching for Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos of the Mexican League, but before he did, he completely overhauled his mechanics. He dropped his arm angle from right around the league average to a sidearm slot. He went from throwing the four-seamer more than half the time to being an east-west sinker-slider guy with 40 inches of break differential between the two pitches. He was an entirely new pitcher. He went 9-4 with a 3.39 ERA with Dos Laredos, and then the won the pitching Triple Crown in the Mexican Winter League, going 10-2 with a 1.60 ERA.

Stock returned to the Red Sox in 2025, putting up solid numbers in Triple-A but struggling in two big league appearances. He’s now in minor league camp with the Mets, where he’s struck out six batters and allowed just one baserunner across three scoreless innings. Stock is now 36 years old with just 75 1/3 major league innings under his belt but a whole lot of miles.

Netherlands

The Netherlands boast a lot of familiar Curaçaoan faces. They’ll have stars like Ozzie Albies, Xander Bogaerts, and Kenley Jansen. They’ll have old friend Didi Gregorius, the only Didi in major league history, who last appeared in the majors in 2022 and has been playing in the Mexican League. They’ll even have brothers of familiar faces in Jeremi Profar and Sharlon Schoop. But Ceddanne Rafaela is the wild card here.

Fresh off a Gold Glove, Boston’s center fielder already has two home runs and a 224 wRC+ in spring training and – you know what? I’m going to have to stop there. I love to watch Rafaela play. He’s exciting in ways both good and bad. He makes you scream when he does something spectacular with his glove, and he makes you scream when he waves at yet another slider in the dirt. But Kiri Oler already nailed the thing that should make us root for the Netherlands in her Pool D preview. It’s this song, “Honkbal Hoofdklasse (On My Radio Tonight)” by Johannes Vonk and the Clogheads, which I listened to on repeat as I wrote this section:

Just to be clear, Johannes Vonk and the Clogheads are not an actual band. This song was recorded in 2020 by Milo Edwards and Nate Bethea of the comedy podcast “Trashfuture,” and jokingly attributed to the fictional 80s band with the 80-grade name. I don’t know much about Trashfuture, but this song is perfect, and after listening to it 10 times in a row, I am ready to run through a brick wall (or even a dam) for the Netherlands and their merry band of honkbalers.

Nicaragua

Nicaragua went winless in 2023, and if the team is going to win a game this time around, it will be on the shoulders of New York Met Mark Vientos. Along with Carlos Rodriguez of the Brewers, he’s one of two current major leaguers on the Nicaraguan roster (free agent Erasmo Ramírez is also suiting up), and although he struggled to a 97 wRC+ in 2025, it’s hard to get the image of his three-win 2024 season, in which he ran a 132 wRC+ and blasted 27 homers in just 111 games, out of your mind. After five spring training games, Vientos somehow has an average exit velocity of 96 mph (!) and a batting average of .077 (?!). He has a 110-mph lineout, a 109.9-mph double play, a 105.2-mph fly out, and then another double play at 104.7 mph. Playing against the Mets in an exhibition game on Tuesday, Vientos did finally get a ball to touch grass, ripping a 108-mph single.

The only logical(ish) conclusion I can draw is that Vientos has been saving all of his luck for team Nicaragua. He’s planning on running a BABIP of .850 in the WBC, blooping and blasting his country past the rest of Pool D and into the knockout round, relying on the wisdom of manager Dusty Baker to hit ‘em where they ain’t.

If you’re a Yankees or Phillies fan and you don’t feel comfortable rooting for a Met, maybe you can root for Jeter Downs, who is still not Mookie Betts, but is thriving with the Softbank Hawks of the NPB, running a 123 wRC+ in 2025.

Venezuela

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here, but Venezuela’s lineup is extremely good. They’ve got Ronald Acuña Jr., Jackson Chourio, and Wilyer Abreu in the outfield. They’ve got Willson Contreras, Luis Arraez, Eugenio Suárez, Maikel Garcia, and Andrés Giménez on the infield. They’ve got William Contreras and Salvador Perez behind the plate. That’s a lot of great bats and great gloves. Garcia and Abreu both won Gold Gloves in 2025, and Giménez is a three-time winner who took home the Platinum Glove in 2024. Honestly, maybe the exciting thing should be the glovework. But what I’m most excited about is the bullpen.

Venezuela doesn’t have much starting pitching depth behind Ranger Suarez, but pitching in the WBC is an all-hands-on-deck enterprise, and Venezuela has a whole lot of big arms to choose from. Daniel Palencia ran a 2.91 ERA and saved 22 games last year, with his four-seamer averaging 99.6 mph. Angel Zerpa’s sinker averaged 96.6. Anthony Molina, Antonio Senzatela, Luinder Avila, and José Buttó were all above 95 mph. Eduardo Rodriguez and Yoendrys Gómez don’t bring as much heat, but their four-seamers were both well above the league average in terms of whiff rate.

Not all of these guys are standouts, but that’s a really deep ‘pen. Venezuela may well mash their way to the knockout round, but they could just as easily make it there by putting up zero after zero.

The World Baseball Classic is officially back! We’re been running preview content for the last several weeks, but now that the tournament is actually underway, you’ve got to pick a team to root for. You may even want to pick one team from each of the four pools. To help you decide on your favorite, I’ll be offering a reason to cheer for each of the 20 teams in the field. We’re starting with Pool C because it’s kicking off today. So is Pool D, whose reasons will run a little later this afternoon. Pools A and B aren’t getting underway until tomorrow, so that’s when we’ll run their excitement primers.

Australia

Australia was one of the big surprises of the 2023 WBC. In the first game of pool play, the Australians took down South Korea in an 8-7 barnburner. Both teams lost to Japan and won all their other games, which was enough to push Australia into the knockout round and keep South Korea out. Australia lost to Cuba by just one run in the quarterfinals. This time around, their final game in Pool C will be against – you guessed it – South Korea, and if the seeds hold true, then that game will once again decide who moves on to the knockout round and who goes home. It should be an exciting one!

I was going to overthink things and talk about Tim Kennelly here. The guy is 39 and made it to Triple-A with the Phillies, and then he went back home and laid siege to the Australia Baseball League record books. He’s the all-time league leader in hits, homers, and RBIs, and he’s second in stolen bases. But we should keep things simple and talk about Travis Bazzana. Read the rest of this entry »

After 14 seasons in the majors, Starling Marte has signed with the Royals on a one-year contract for $2 million. The 37-year-old Marte brings a proven bat to an outfield that should look at least a little bit different than it has in recent years. Between one-year deals for Marte and Lane Thomas and trades for Isaac Collins and Kameron Misner, Kansas City has now added more than an entire outfield to its roster, even though the team has two returning incumbents in Kyle Isbel and Jac Caglianone.

Marte’s career is maybe too easy to overlook; after being a core member of three Pirates playoff teams during his first three full seasons, both he and his team faded into obscurity until he was traded three times between the start of 2020 and the end of July 2021. Then, for the past four years, he was a role player on a star-studded Mets roster. For that reason, let’s make sure we appreciate just how great he’s been. He has a career wRC+ of 115, 361 stolen bases, and 35.9 WAR to his name. He’s had eight different seasons of at least 3.0 WAR and earned a couple of Gold Gloves, a couple of All-Star nods, and even an MVP vote. You might be surprised to learn that JAWS ranks him 46th among left fielders. He’s not in Hall of Fame territory, but he’s a lot closer than you might think. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody remembers the biggest moment from the 2023 World Baseball Classic. In the championship game, with Japan leading the United States 3-2 in the top of the ninth, Mike Trout stepped into the box as the tying run. Even though he was the Mike Trout – the surefire Hall of Famer with 71 WAR to his name who was coming off a 176 wRC+ in 2022 – he looked a little nervous. Before he even dug his cleats into the dirt, he sneaked four different peeks out toward the pitcher’s mound.

He did so for good reason. Out on the mound was Shohei Ohtani, the most fearsome player in the game, as well as Trout’s teammate. The endgame was a chess match. Ohtani started Trout with a ferocious sweeper just below the zone, but Trout took an absurdly easy take. No longer nibbling, Ohtani blew a center-cut fastball right by Trout at 100 mph. He touched 102 on the next pitch. At the end, with the count full, Ohtani threw a sweeper that started out over the heart of the plate and then took a left turn so sharp you’d think it had just read A People’s History of the United States. Trout couldn’t lay off it. Japan had won. Pandemonium reigned in the Tokyo Dome.

We could easily get another best-on-best matchup to end the 2026 WBC. Whether you believe that the best pitcher in baseball right now is Tarik Skubal or Paul Skenes, either one of them could find himself trying to close out the championship against Ohtani or Juan Soto (or Ronald Acuña Jr., or Vladimir Guerrero Jr., or Fernando Tatis Jr.; those Juniors really can hit). We could just as easily see Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Cristopher Sánchez facing down Aaron Judge. Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere in my list of article ideas, I have a theoretical question tucked away. What’s the longest distance you could hit a baseball? Not what’s the longest distance a really strong player could hit a ball, but what’s the longest distance that it’s possible to hit a baseball? I haven’t gotten around to it because I’d need to interview a physicist or a materials scientist or both, but I’m excited about this question. Say you’re an infinitely strong batter with an infinitely fast swing. The distance you can hit the ball isn’t infinite. At some point, you’ll hit the ball hard enough that your bat will shatter, reducing the efficiency of the energy transfer. Or maybe the ball will be the weak link, and you’ll hit it so hard that it will deform into a less aerodynamic shape or explode into a thousand pieces. There’s a limit somewhere.

I will write this article one day (so please don’t steal it), and it will be fun to discover the answer through math and logic, but theory isn’t the only way to solve a problem. Last Thursday, Jac Caglianone tried to find the answer through pure experimentation, which is to say that in the top of the fifth inning against the Diamondbacks, the Royals right fielder turned on a Yilber Díaz fastball and ripped it into the right-center gap at 120.2 mph. The missile made Caglianone just the eighth player to gain entry into the 120 MPH Club in the 11-year history of Statcast.

It’s the hardest-hit ball of Caglianone’s career (officially, anyway; we’ll return to that later). It’s also the hardest-hit ball of spring training, and it’s far from the only fireworks display he’s put on in the past week. With a 116.5-mph double on Saturday and a 115.2-mph homer on Tuesday, Caglianone now owns three of the 10 hardest-hit balls of spring training. More importantly, it’s the 30th-hardest ball ever recorded by Statcast at any level. Thankfully, Statcast is now in every spring training ballpark, or we never would have grasped just how special Caglianone has been this spring. Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Soto wants a Most Valuable Player award. Plenty of players give voice to outsized ambitions during spring training, but at this point in Soto’s career, the goal seems downright reasonable. The future Hall of Famer already has a World Series ring, a batting title, a stolen base crown, a Home Run Derby trophy, and bunch of All-Star nods and Silver Sluggers. Seeing as he’s unlikely to get a Gold Glove (barring some sort of trophy swap situation with Francisco Lindor), an MVP certainly seems like the next box to check. But as great as Soto has been since the moment he debuted for the Nationals in 2018, he doesn’t have a well-rounded game, and I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that his weaknesses might keep him from ever winning an MVP. Now that it’s his stated goal, let’s take a closer look at his chances.

Soto is one of the best and most consistent players in the game. According to JAWS, he’s already the 36th-best right fielder of all time, and he’s still three years too young to be the president (in the Dominican Republic; he’s eight years too young in the USA). Since his first full season in 2019, he’s missed an average of just seven games per season and he’s never put up a wRC+ below 143. In any given season, if you had to pick the player most likely to rack up at least 5.0 WAR, Soto would be your guy. But his game is also incomplete. He’s the second coming of Ted Williams, in ways both good and bad. He’s got the other-worldly plate discipline and the power, but he’s also got the putrid outfield defense.

Soto is well aware of his deficiencies. “I feel like everybody tries to do better than what they did before,” he told Anthony DiComo of MLB.com. “I would definitely love to be better around the bases and better around the outfield. Even hitting, I try to keep my hitting increased. Thank God I’ve been doing well the past couple seasons. I’ve been putting numbers up there, career highs and stuff like that. So I just want to keep doing the same thing. I try to be better year after year.” Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Chris Sale no longer has to do what he does under the cloud of a one-year contract. On Tuesday, the Braves announced they’d signed their soon-to-be 37-year-old ace to a one-year contract extension with a team option for 2028. The deal represents a huge raise. Sale is making $18 million this year – the team option year at the end of the two-year extension he signed back in 2024 – and the new extension will pay him $27 million in 2027. If the Braves pick up the 2028 option, they’ll pay him $30 million. No word of a buyout for that final year has been reported, and the announcement included no mention of a 1% donation to the Atlanta Braves Foundation.

Even though the Braves are not getting the kind of discount you associate with a contract extension, this seems like a no-brainer for them. Yes, they’re paying ace prices for the age-37 (and possibly age-38) season of a pitcher whose injury history includes a Tommy John surgery and five variations on the word “fracture.” But Sale really is an ace, and his performance has showed no signs of dropping off. Since he arrived in Atlanta in 2024 (and for the sake of Red Sox fans, I won’t mention how he got there), Sale has a 25-8 record with a 2.46 ERA and 2.33 FIP. He’s struck out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced, and he won the Cy Young award in his first season with the team. In 2025, his four-seamer averaged 94.8 mph. That’s above average, especially for a left-handed starter, and especially for someone with a funky sidearm delivery, and especially when you factor in the bump in effective velocity due to the above-average extension from his 6-foot-6 frame. That’s a lot of especiallys making Sale’s velocity play up, and it’s reassuring to know that it has looked pretty stable in recent years.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training is underway and rosters are getting filled up. We’re now down to the part of the offseason where veterans whose recent performances have left them unable to find a guaranteed spot sign minor league deals with non-roster invites. Today we’ll break down the signings of Rhys Hoskins with the Guardians, Michael Conforto with the Cubs, and Thairo Estrada with the Orioles. All three have seen their production drop off over the past two years, but all three have a viable path toward sticking on the roster or even landing a starting spot.

We’ll start in Cleveland, where Hoskins will receive $1.5 million if he makes the roster. This move makes plenty of sense, but it’s important to note that the Guardians aren’t as desperate for a player like him as they would have been in years past. From 2021 to 2023, the only team with fewer than their 454 home runs was the Pirates (441). Cleveland’s 82 wRC+ against left-handed pitching was also the second-worst mark in baseball over that period. Back then, adding a big right-handed slugger who strikes out and hits homers would have been just what the doctor ordered. However, the Guardians are in a different spot right now. Over the past two years, they’ve ranked right around the middle of the league in home runs overall and in wRC+ against left-handed pitching. This is still a good fit, but Hoskins is no longer the slam dunk he would have been a couple years ago. Read the rest of this entry »