I guess I’m supposed to be relieved that Italy beat Mexico Wednesday night in the World Baseball Classic, allowing our over-rated and under-performing United States team to slip into the knockout stage of the event through the back door.
In truth, even though I am quite the baseball fan, this matters little to me. I’ve decided to give only passing attention to this Theater of the Absurd, sporting category, that is the World Baseball Classic.
The whole concept, athletes playing for their country, or home territory, is a farce when it comes to the World Baseball Classic.
I understand this sort of thing was true to a tiny extent in the past Winter Olympics, with two American females, a skater and a skier, competing for China because the grass (as in money) was greener there.
That didn’t bother me so much because I was there almost entirely for the men’s hockey, and that USA gold medal winning team had all domestic talent on the roster.
I’m pretty sure every player could speak English, knew the words to our National Anthem, pays taxes to the IRS and needn’t fear if ICE officers were in the neighborhood.
The, shall we say, loose rules the World Baseball Classic has in determining eligibility to play for a given team came to my attention when Lars Nootbaar played for Japan in 2023.
I doubt you’d find many Nootbaars in a Tokyo telephone directory. Research at the time indicated Nootbaar was born in California, to a Dutch father and Japanese mother. Choosing to play for Japan, instead of the Dutch team, just might have had something to do with Japan standing a better chance of winning, which is exactly what happened.
Fast-forward to this spring’s World Baseball Classic and, even though I was paying little attention, I was stunned when I caught part of one game looking for a college basketball contest and saw a Puerto Rico game in which Nolan Arenado was playing for Puerto Rico.
That’s Nolan Arenado, born in California, who played for the United States teams in this event twice previously – 2017 and 2023.
How did this happen? Reports online note his mother is of “Puerto Rican and Cuban descent.” Was that different in previous years? No.
But, according to no less a source than Arenado, as quoted by USA Today, “I wanted to play for the USA again, but I didn’t get the call.”
Puerto Rico did call and, due to those ridiculously loose eligibility rules, Arenado is playing for the island team.
Pitching in that game at the time was Seth Lugo, born in Shreveport, Louisiana, but who could opt to play for Puerto Rico because a grandfather was Puerto Rican.
Fittingly for the purposes of this blog post, the sensation of this World Baseball Classic has been Italy, which stunned the United States 8-6 in pool play. There have been reports since that the American manager incorrectly thought his team already had advanced to knockout play before that game, therefore watered down the lineup, and also that a lot of players partied well into the night leading up to the game.
That setback meant the United States needed Italy to beat Mexico Wednesday evening for the U.S. to advance and it happened, by a wide 9-1 margin.
The announcers were giddy, talking about what a great day it was for baseball in Italy. Not exactly.
Italy’s starting pitcher vs. Mexico was Aaron Nola, who threw five scoreless innings and just happens to have been born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Ah, but his GREAT grandparents on his father’s side emigrated from Sicily and in the WBC, that’s good enough (abbastanza buono).
Nola is one of nine pitchers on the Italy roster born in the United States. That means only six pitchers from that group actually were born in the country they represent in this event.
The best split is among the two catchers on the Italy roster, one from the U.S. and one from Italy.
Of the 13 position players, 11 are Americans. There also is one Venezuelan and one Canadian, meaning the Italy roster has ZERO position players who were born in Italy.
A fitting coda to this Italy-Mexico game was the final out for Mexico was hit into by Randy Arozarena, a Cuban-born player who defected to Mexico in 2015 and got around to becoming a citizen in 2022, in part to play in events such as these. I guess he didn’t have any distant relatives from Mexico.
That, my friends, is the World Baseball Classic in a nutshell. Spare me all the talk of national pride.
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