The World Baseball Classic Showed The Sport Where To Find Its Joy

Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout brought the World Baseball Classic to its most delightful conclusion last night, in a showdown between the only two men properly positioned to force the Los Angeles Angels to cease to be what they are. It took an unconventional format more associated with international football and a tournament that best suited the artistic temperaments of non-American teams to get to that moment, but when it all came to its ridiculously cliche conclusion, felt the whole endeavor depends largely on fate. It ended with a swing and miss from Trout on a 3-2 hellslider from Ohtani to give Japan the well-deserved championship. The final score was 3-2, for all that mattered.

It was a glorious ending to a triumphant event that showed that baseball doesn’t necessarily have to feel the way it usually feels when played and gleefully watched. What worked about it was neither a rejection nor an acknowledgment of the new rules of the game or the postponement or a pitch clock and had nothing to do with the fact that a game that would have lasted 203 minutes lasted 189. So much of the conversation about baseball has focused on fixing what’s supposedly wrong with it that it’s all too easy to forget that the more fundamental things of the game have always worked. Even before Trout and Ohtani stared at each other, the WBC had pointed out that fixing baseball’s problems might be more up to the people who watch, play, organize and operate the sport by making a fundamental change in their attitude do own work.

Simply put, baseball isn’t an impediment because it’s too slow or too sophisticated or lacking in life, but because the people who love it have allowed the atmosphere to be dictated by the people who don’t. Because of this, the news that there will be another WBC in 2026 feels two years too far away. In fact, without anyone seeing it coming, this WBC could be the beginning of what can save baseball from its own crappy self-esteem.

To do that, MLB would have to take over the tournament and hit it in the middle of every player’s baseball season — right over the All-Star break, to be precise. Cut three weeks out of a mutually dead period of the season when everyone is both sufficiently stretched out and a bit bored, and just leave it right there. The regular seasons can all be extended earlier and later, or the season could be shortened to say 144 games. The tournament that just won raves and reviews can reach a wider and more appreciative audience; The big players who would otherwise play games 84 through 102 could spend some quality time with their families, their golf games, or their elbow rehab.

And why would that happen, I hear you ask, while taking up the empty argument for cheap player owners worried about those Tuesday night Marlins at Pirates games to draw 7,191? Simply. Because fun makes money for people smart enough to encourage enjoyment for its own sake.

Every argument against the WBC is based on the way it has caused inconvenience to owners as if Stevie Cohen that Edwin Diaz or Jimmy Crane Jose Altuve is not losing is the definitive argument against an event with global appeal in a sport giving more scope has descended into a wormhole of increasing regional interest. After all, nobody gets injured during spring training, and there’s nothing wrong with paying a guy not to play if his injury happened on your job site. Now that regional sports networks are past their sell-by date, a more global perspective is needed if the sport is not to become a historical piece like boxing or horse racing.

This is not inevitable unless the owners make it so. The WBC—this WBC, to be sure—has brought back an effervescence to the sport that it had been struggling to find for years; Maybe it’s just that brilliant athletes fighting for their home countries are more interesting to more people than TV ads where Paul Goldschmidt squints and says, “It’s all about the game.” At a time when the Sport is poised to change equipment, positioning, pace and other orthodoxies – and commissioner/litter cushion Rob Manfred said on Tuesday the new rules will be adjusted in the near future to reflect changed requirements – a possible solution to the quest for the baseball’s lost joy seems clear.

And it’s not as if the All-Star Game, the highest-profile event to be nudged by this newly-centered WBC, has provided an antidote to the increasingly tinny mood of those most devoted to the sport. Every year the game’s television ratings are worse than the last, no game has left a lasting impression since interleague play began, unless you count the mandatory draw that brought the event and commissioner Bud Selig into disrepute, and even a Marlins Pirates neighborhood. Game series is more useful for sports than that.

Given how little there is to lose or even repress, why not do the boldest thing? Why not call a summit where all the domestic leagues get together and make a joint plan to give back a little at the top and take back the equivalent with an actual mid-season Case? Why not note the best thing about the WBC, which is that everyone involved very obviously enjoyed it and would do it again as soon as possible. If baseball needs to change, and the people who run the sport say it does, why not start with a schedule change that’s actually based on pleasure rather than metrics?

And when the only price to pay for everyone’s joy is a little angel-on-angel crime—well, who says no to that? After all, it’s a more time-honoured tradition than almost anything else in baseball.