A quick recap of the 2026 World Baseball Classic.
I hyper-covered early versions of the WBC, back in 2013 and 2017 especially, then curiously didn’t post a single thing about the 2023 version. I think i ran into “fixture overload” with respect to work and writing duties that spring; it was the first year I began officially covering Pickleball for Forbes Magazine and I probably just ran out of spare time. This year, while I have been following the storylines, this will be the sole recap for similar reasons; March is a tough time to keep up with all the requirements on my time.
I feel like each iteration, this event grows in stature amongst the fans and (especially) the players. This time around many called the USA team the greatest team ever assembled … yet they barely qualified out of the group stage thanks to (frankly) stupidity from its manager.
This event had a pall over it thanks to overbearing Insurance requirements that blocked a slew of high profile players from playing, almost all from Puerto Rico and Venezuela, which stemmed form Edwin Diaz’ 2023 injury that cost him the season and cost the insurance company his 2023 salary of $20M. They cracked down on a number of players this year, which depleted some of the Latin American teams greatly.
Here’s a quick recap of the event, with thoughts on group stage and the knockout results.
Group Stage Observations
Here’s a link to the four groups:
- Group A: Canada and Puerto Rico advance. Cuba in particular knocked out, though they were not allowed to use any Cuba-born players who have defected. I did a post back in 2017 surmising what a “unified Cuban” roster would look like for that WBC and it was spectacular. Now? It’d still be a pretty solid lineup, but until something massive changes geopolitically we’ll never know.
- Group B: In an amazing Gaffe, USA’s manager (and former Nat) Mark DeRosa apparently forgets the team hadn’t yet qualified and put out an all-bench roster for their final game against Italy … then had to wait to see if the result of Italy-Mexico allowed them to advance. They lucked out, since the “Italy” team, which features exactly one player actually born there, the rest qualifying seemingly because their names ended in a vowel (i’m only half kidding; nearly the entire roster qualified by virtue of their parents holding Italian passport at some point in their life), went on a rampage and blew through the group, finishing undefeated and sending the favored Mexicans home. The Italian team of MLB regulars have an espresso machine in the dugout and slut down shots of caffine after every homer; awesoem.
- Group C: no surprises here: the two favorites (Japan and South Korea) advanced as expected. It’s perhaps slightly surprising not to see Chinese Taipei futher along given its little league dominance; they finish 4th behind Australia. Perhaps the greatest story of the group stage was the send-off Czech pitcher Ondřej Satoria got upon his removal from the group stage game. He famously struck out Shohei Ohtani back in 2023 and threw nearly 5 shutout innings in his final WBC appearance. Not bad for a guy who plays amateur league in his home country and works as an Electrical engineer full time.
- Group D: again no surprises here: the dominant Dominican Republic team cruised through the bracket, with Venezuela second. The DR is a power house team, likely the best its ever put together, fitting for a country that provides something like 20% of the players in the sport.
Quarter finals:
- DR destroyed Korea 10-0; they’re going to be a tough out and are probably favorites to win again for the first time since 2013.
- USA held on to beat Canada 5-3. Former Nat Mike Soroka got batted around and took the loss.
- Italy continue their run, beating Puerto Rico 8-6 after getting to PR’s starter Seth Lugo early.
- Venezuela shocked 3-time champ Japan 8-5, somehow surviving an awful outing from their star Ranger Suarez to win.
Semis:
- USA-DR was perhaps the most star-studded game the game has seen in decades, perhaps since the famous 1970 MLB all star game, which featured 20 future Hall of Famers. USA ends up winning a nail biter 2-1 which probably will be more remembered for two awful strike-3 calls to end the inning and offensive threat late for the DR. ABS can’t get here soon enough.
- Venezuela overcame the upstart Italy team to reach its first WBC final. Fitting in a year where the US president forcibly arrested the sitting Venezuelan president in the months prior to the event.
Final:
- VZ wins 3-2 with a go-ahead run in the 9th. A very good game for those who watched it, with USA’s rookie pitcher Nolan McLean holding his own and Harper hitting a super-clutch 8th inning homer. I just have to say: for all the talent we put on the offensive side of the ball, here’s the arms we threw in the final game: McLean, Keller, Vest, Jax, Whitlock, and Rodgers. Not exactly who we were promised nor a comprehensive list of the top American arms of today.
Here’s the updated list of WBC finals, with baseball powerhouse Venezuela now joining the list of winners:
- 2026: Venezuela beats USA 3-2. (Eduardo Rodriguez pitching, Eugenio Suarez hitting)
- 2023: Japan beats USA 3-2 (Ohtani coming out party)
- 2017: USA beats Puerto Rico 8-0 (Stroman throws 6ip of 1hit ball in final)
- 2013: Dominican Republic beats Puerto Rico 3-0 (Encarnacion drives in the runs, Dedundo throws 5 scoreless)
- 2009: Japan d South Korea 5-3 (Ichiro goes 4-6 in title game)
- 2006: Japan d Cuba 10-6 (Dice-K coming out party)
Departing thoughts: I think Venezuela winning is awesome for the sport: we’ve now had USA, DR, Japan, and Venezuela win this thing (with PR, Cuba, and South Korea reaching the finals) in the history of the competition; that’s basically 95% of the origin countries for players in this sport. All we need now is for Mexico to finally break through and have a run along with Canada and we’ll have all the major baseball playing countries represented.