Who To Root for in the World Baseball Classic: Pool C

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.

Bazzana debuted in the ABL at 15, then obliterated Pac-12 pitching at Oregon State, batting .407 with 28 home runs in his junior year. That’s 28 home runs in 60 games. The Guardians picked him first overall in 2024, and in 2025, he mashed his way to Triple-A. How’s this for consistency? He started the season at Double-A Columbus, where he ran a 137 wRC+. After a strained oblique, he rehabbed in the Complex League, where he ran a 137 wRC+. He went back to Columbus and ran a 137 wRC+, then got promoted to Triple-A, where he ran a 138 wRC+. So far he has a 134 wRC+ at spring training. Oh, and his first hit of spring training looked like this:

That’s a 423-foot home run that left the bat at 107.8 mph. Bazzana did it again yesterday, blasting a no-doubter in the seventh inning of last night’s opener against Taiwan. Let’s just enjoy the Travis Bazzana show, shall we?

As a final note, prominent Australian Liam Hendriks is not on the Australian roster, but he is in the Designated Pitcher Pool, which means that should the Australians advance to the knockout round, he could jump in and replace one of the currently rostered pitchers. That alone is reason enough to root for Hendriks, but look at his portraits from picture day with the Twins. Somehow he looks like he’s in the middle of dropping an F-bomb in all three of them:

Czechia

This one comes courtesy of my friend Michael Clair, who is covering Pool C in Tokyo right now and who literally wrote the book on the Czech team. It’s called We Sacrifice Everything to Baseball and it comes out April 1. Clair is a brilliant writer and he scarified a lot himself in order to write this book, spending weeks at a time in Europe researching, observing, and interviewing. I’m really excited to read my friend’s book, and I will proudly shout that you should preorder it right here.

You probably remember from the last WBC that the Czech players have day jobs to make ends meet. Last time, electrical technician Ondřej Satoria struck out Shohei Ohtani with his changeup, which he calls “The Worker.” This time, it could be firefighter Martin Schneider. However, that was the Czech story from the last WBC.

Clair pointed me to a few players who came painfully close to the dream. Catcher Martin Cervenka made it to Triple-A with both the Orioles and Mets. In 2019, he batted .372 in 12 games with the Norfolk Tides. On Friday, September 3, 2021, Nationals outfielder Andrew Stevenson nearly decapitated Mets catcher Chance Sisco during a play at the plate.

With a doubleheader the next day, the Mets rushed Cervenka to DC and told him he’d be activated if Sisco’s injuries were as bad as they looked. They weren’t. Sisco somehow escaped with nothing more than a bruised knee, and the Mets activated James McCann from the IL. Cervenka spent the weekend as the team’s bullpen catcher, then got sent back down. He never made it back up.

Cervenka is arguably the best player in Czech history, but Clair also pointed to Marek Chlup, who debuted in the Czech Extraliga as a 15-year-old. In 2022, Chlup led Division II North Greenville University to a national championship, winning Conference Carolinas Player of the Year honors. He slashed .350/.456/.648 for a 1.105 OPS in college, then kept his OPS over 1.000 in 2023 with the Lake Country DockHounds of the independent American Association. His numbers dropped in 2024, though, and he signed a developmental contract with the Yomiuri Giants in 2025. Chlup became the first Czech player in NPB history when he got called up to the big club, but he broke his wrist after just two games. The Giants didn’t re-sign him, so he’s now with Caliente de Durango of the Mexican League. If he makes the team, he’ll be the first Czech player in that league too. Chlup notched two hits in the opener against South Korea this morning, and both came off the bat at over 100 mph.

Japan

The Japanese will once again be huge favorites on their home turf. The three-time champions are looking to go back-to-back, just as they did in 2006 and 2009. You don’t really need any extra reasons to tune in when Shohei Ohtani is involved, even if he’ll only serve as a batter, and the last time we saw Yoshinobu Yamamoto, he was dispatching the Blue Jays in the World Series on zero days rest. Still, let’s go with Munetaka Murakami, because if he goes off, he’ll go off in a big way.

Murakami and Kazuma Okamoto came over from NPB through the posting system this offseason to sign with the White Sox and the Blue Jays, respectively. Three years ago, Okamoto dominated in the WBC. He slashed .333/.556/.722 with two home runs and eight walks in seven games. He’s put up a wRC+ of 160 or better in each of the past three seasons in NPB, and he’s currently at a 210 mark after four spring training games. He’s the safer bet to step into the majors and perform, and he’s got a ton of power, topping 30 homers in six different seasons. But Murakami is a different kind of exciting.

There are legitimate questions about whether Murakami will make enough contact to succeed in the majors. He’s run a strikeout rate above 28% in each of his past three seasons in NPB, and he’s currently above 38% in spring training. But he’s also batting .385, and let’s not forget that he can do this:

That ball was launched at 115.1 mph. Murakami owns the single-season NPB home run record after hitting 56 bombs in 2022, and aside from a cup of coffee in his age-18 season, he’s never failed to hit at least 28 in a full season. Injuries limited him to 56 games in 2025, but he still hit an astonishing 22 home runs in that stretch and ran a 211 wRC+. Our own Jordan Rosenblum predicted that Murakami would hit 35 homers and lead the league in strikeouts this year. Nearly all our projection systems think Murakami is going to strike out more than a third of the time, but they also think he’s going to bop a whole lot of home runs. Joey Gallo levels of boom and bust are frustrating, but they’re exciting too.

South Korea

South Korea has a lot of familiar faces. Hyun Jin Ryu 류현진 is back! We’ll see Jung Hoo Lee 이정후, Hyeseong Kim 김혜성, Dane Dunning, Jahmai Jones, and Shay Whitcomb. Whitcomb has big whiff issues, but he’s also got serious pop, and he showed it off this morning. He launched two massive home runs in South Korea’s 11-4 drubbing of Czechia:

As Kiri Oler noted in her preview of Pool C, Korea is packed with on-base machines, and the on-basiest of them all is 2025 KBO Rookie of the Year Hyun Min Ahn 안현민. Please take a moment to think about how much poise you possessed when you were 21 years old. Now you’re ready to appreciate Ahn, who walked more than he struck out and swung at just 36.8% of the pitches he saw! Even Juan Soto wasn’t that patient as a rookie! (To be fair, Soto was 18 when he was a rookie. By the time he was a grizzled 21-year-old with a batting title, a Silver Slugger, and a World Series ring, his swing rate was down to 35%, but you get the point.)

I understand that watching somebody take most of the pitches they see isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, but Ahn ran a .448 on-base percentage last year. If we can’t get excited about walks, is this even FanGraphs? Also, Ahn boasts some real pop. He hit 22 home runs last year, and he absolutely obliterated this ball in an exhibition game against the Orix Buffaloes on Tuesday:

If you’re wondering why Ahn went with the airplane celebration while rounding third, it’s because the Koreans haven’t made it out of pool play since 2009. They’re determined to fly to Miami for the knockout round, so they’re celebrating home runs with their trademark bat flips, then making Ms with their hands and doing the airplane. Ahn notched a hit and a walk in the opener against Czechia, so he’s starting off the tournament with a meager .400 OBP. Hopefully, he can get back up to his usual standard.

Taiwan

You could certainly cheer for Taiwan because 45-year-old Chien-Ming Wang, who went 68-34 across nine big league seasons, is the team’s bullpen coach. He led the majors with 19 wins in 2006 and finished second in the AL Cy Young voting. Welcome back, old friend! However, the youth movement, specifically the Sacramento youth movement, is the real reason to root for this team.

As I mentioned earlier this week, the A’s have three different minor league pitchers on the Taiwanese team: lefty Wei-En Lin and righties Tzu-Chen Sha and Chen Zhong-Ao Zhuang. Lin was one of Eric Longenhagen’s Picks to Click thanks to a good four-seamer and a Vulcan change. At just 20, he’ll be one of the youngest players in the tournament, though not the youngest on the team. That honor goes to fellow 20-year-old pitcher Jun-Wei Zhang. Lin made it to Double-A Midland, but he and Sha played together both at Low-A Stockton and High-A Lansing. Lin struggled a bit in his two Double-A starts, but he struck out more than a third of the batters he faced and finished the year with a 3.72 ERA and 3.24 FIP. The 21-year-old Sha struggled once he got to Lansing, but in Stockton, he struck out nearly 30% of the batters he faced and ran a 2.70 ERA and 2.68 FIP.

Zhuang is the geriatric of the group at 25. He was a monster in 2024, going 6-2 and running a 2.09 ERA and 2.96 FIP across three levels and 86 innings pitched. However, he cooled off in 2025, spending the entire season in Midland with an ERA and FIP just over 4.00.

Think that’s all? We haven’t even gotten to 25-year-old second baseman Hao-Yu Lee, who just ranked ninth on our list of Tigers top prospects, or 22-year-old lefty Yu-Min Lin, whose high-spin breakers pushed him to the no. 15 spot in the Diamondbacks system. If you want to cheer for some up-and-comers, this is your team.