Why I Love the WBC

I found myself speechless on Friday afternoon. I was partaking in one of my favorite yearly rituals, watching the first round of the NCAA tournament at a sports bar. Something about the atmosphere calls to me — masses of strangers on the edges of their barstools, captivated by the energy of do-or-die games between wildly mismatched teams. As it happened, the bar I picked was a Purdue bar, and the mood slowly soured as the Boilermakers struggled with and ultimately fell to tiny Fairleigh Dickinson, one of the greatest upsets in the history of the tournament.

That game got me thinking about why I love the World Baseball Classic so much. It’s a newfound love of mine. The last time the WBC was held, in 2017, I paid exactly as much attention to it as my work required; given that my job was to try to make money trading interest rates, that worked out to exactly zero. I vaguely knew that the United States won, but even as a baseball fan, it didn’t really grab me. I liked the Cardinals, not Team USA, and it felt like a weird time of year for competitive baseball.

Having watched most of this year’s games, I’m sad I wasn’t watching before. The WBC is like nothing else in professional baseball, a chaotic and exciting mashup of national identity and high tension, often between teams that have no business being on the same field as each other.

Major league baseball is, by design, a slog. No individual game matters all that much because there are so many of them. If you’re a player, you can’t get too high or too low, even if you really want to. The Pirates and the Dodgers are a big mismatch, but even if the Pirates beat the odds and win a game, that game almost doesn’t matter. They’ll play again the next day, and then the next day, and then grind through a whole year’s worth of games.

By the time we hit the playoffs, the mismatches are less extreme. Even then, we all clamor for longer series. One-game Wild Card? Barbaric! Three-game series? How will we learn who’s better? Most of the discussion around changes in playoff structure is about giving the best teams more advantages or preserving the prestige of a World Series title.

To be clear, I’m fine with that. But the baseball they play in the major leagues is woefully lacking in chaos. It’s designed that way. Do anything 162 times, and the edges start to get sanded down. Sure, there are wild individual games, but they all get averaged out in the long run. You have to play a ton of games of baseball to separate the wheat from the chaff, so the majors have built a system that does just that.

A baseball tournament is not like that. The stakes of every individual game are far higher, because a single run can be the difference between advancing and going home. Those are hallowed moments in MLB history — Games 7 and Games 163 and last games of the season between two teams who are somehow even in the standings. They happen rarely, and we cherish them for the immediacy of the moment, the feeling that the future is undecided and fluctuating wildly back and forth.

That’s nearly every game in the WBC. The eventual champion will play in only seven games. Plenty of teams played in only four. There’s no “get ‘em next time,” no “keep grinding and it’ll even out.” The Netherlands brought a stacked team, but they gave up a six-spot in the fourth inning of their game against Italy, and that was that. Italy advanced on runs-allowed tiebreakers, the Netherlands went home, and there was no tomorrow to make up for it.

I don’t think I’d want this kind of baseball all the time. I like baseball because of its probabilistic nature, because the best pitchers and hitters wear out their opposition over a truly irrefutable length of time. Aaron Judge didn’t get hot for two weeks; he was just better than everyone else all year. Jack Flaherty’s transcendent finish to 2019 was only half a season, but even that was 15 starts over three months. I love it. I love how baseball rewards the best players and teams through sheer weight of time.

For a few weeks, though? It’s amazing. It’s not the highest-quality baseball you’ll watch all year, at least on average. Electricians, indy ball stalwarts, and prospects rub elbows with Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, and a coterie of All-Stars. Some of the games are outrageous mismatches. Team USA started a lineup that would comfortably be the best in the major leagues against Team Great Britain, which countered with a lineup that featured Trayce Thompson and prospects. Forget Dodgers-Pirates; this was closer to Dodgers-Altoona Curve, the Pirates’ Double-A affiliate.

Naturally, Great Britain got on the board first, courtesy of a Thompson homer. The American lineup only managed six runs despite facing a pitching staff headlined by Vance Worley. Not featuring; headlined by. And Team GB wasn’t done. They beat Team Colombia and were somehow even with Team Mexico through six innings, 1–1. If they won that game, they had a good shot at advancing. Mexico starts major leaguers up and down the lineup and multiple All-Stars in the rotation. Their reward? Three innings of baseball, with the loser eliminated. Mexico pulled it out, but it certainly wasn’t preordained. They earned it, the way that every team that advances in the WBC has earned it.

That feeling of upstarts trading blows with blue bloods reminds me of college basketball. Fairleigh Dickinson didn’t make any permanent dent in the hierarchy of college basketball. Next year, they’ll still be in the Northeast Conference, longshots to grace a bracket and with no chance at all of sustaining the kind of success that Purdue treats as a birthright. But for one afternoon, they beat them, and only one team gets to advance. Great Britain is never going to be a baseball powerhouse, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t eliminate Team Mexico with a few timely singles.

Tournaments aren’t fair. They’re not a great method for determining the best team, particularly in baseball. If you’re watching the WBC hoping for a referendum on which country has the best players, there simply aren’t enough games to say for sure.

My proposal to you: don’t watch for that. Watch for the always-on drama that you so rarely get in our sport. Every March, a shocking number of people who otherwise barely know anything about college basketball watch and love the NCAA tournament. It’s not because the game is so pretty, or the matchups so delightfully even. It’s the leverage, the feeling that every moment is momentous for every team, and the resulting emotions of the players. The WBC has all of that, and raucous crowds to boot. It’s not the kind of baseball I’m used to, but it’s baseball that I’ve discovered I love.