Game theory | International baseball

The United States triumphs at last in its own “national pastime”

The globalisation of baseball will be aided, not hindered, by the first-ever championship for the inventors of the sport

By D.R. | LOS ANGELES

AT FIRST glance, it sounds about as surprising as the sun rising in the east: on March 22nd the United States baseball team was crowned as world champions. In the semifinals of the World Baseball Classic (WBC), the quadrennial international tournament organised by Major League Baseball (MLB), America took advantage of two uncharacteristic defensive errors by Japan, a two-time champion, and escaped with a 2-1 victory. The following night, in front of over 50,000 fans at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, they blew out the previously undefeated Puerto Rican team, holding their rivals hitless for the first six innings and going on to win 8-0.

Well, duh: baseball is an American sport. The game was born in the USA (though not in Cooperstown, New York, as the myth tells it); the world’s finest league by far is based there (with a lone Canadian team); and the majority of that league’s players and stars are American. Just as one would assume that the world champion of Australian-rules football would probably be Australian, and the world champion of hurling might well be Irish, it stands to reason that the United States should stand a pretty good chance of winning a global baseball tournament.

Yet in the topsy-turvy and relatively brief history of the WBC, what in theory should have been a fait accompli turned out to constitute something of a breakthrough. In the previous three editions of the event, first held in 2006, Team USA’s performances were stunningly disappointing: one semifinal appearance, two exits before the knockout round and a total won-lost record of 10-10. Going into this year’s Classic, America was not even the undisputed favourite: bookmakers gave the United States and the defending-champion Dominican Republic (DR) equal chances of victory, at around one in four. Although America may not have been an outright underdog at its own “national pastime”, it most certainly had a well-deserved reputation as a massive underachiever.

There are a few perfectly good excuses for why Team USA has fared so much worse in international play than, say, America’s men’s basketball sides, who have won six of the past seven Olympic men’s gold medals. Perhaps the most important is the inherently volatile nature of the sport. Basketball is a remarkably steady and predictable sport: the best teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA) win over 75% of the time, and can be favoured as much one-to-20 over an unusually weak opponent. In contrast, the top clubs in MLB often fall short of even a 60% winning percentage, and rarely have better than a two-in-three chance of victory in a single game. In order to smooth out baseball’s inevitable random fluctuations, MLB plays a grinding 162-game season, long enough for numerous hot and cold streaks to cancel each other out. But the WBC is crammed into three weeks in March. As a result, unlike the best-of-seven-game series used in the MLB postseason, its semifinals and finals consist of a single game each, virtually ensuring that some weaker sides will advance through luck alone. Even a true juggernaut “Dream Team”, as dominant as America’s 1992 Olympic basketball squad, would probably have less than a 50% probability of winning a tournament so subject to the vagaries of chance.

Another obstacle for Team USA, paradoxically, has been the relatively small number of other countries that play baseball at an elite level. Although rosters in MLB and the NBA are both just over one-quarter non-American, the makeup of those leagues’ foreign players differs sharply. The NBA draws widely from around the globe: no single country makes up even 12% of its non-American players, and the top five put together represent just 42% of the total. Because foreign basketball talent is spread among so many nationalities, no single country save the United States can compile a roster packed with marquee NBA names. That has enabled America to beat up on a series of weak competitors, each featuring one or two top-tier pros surrounded by far lesser lights.

In contrast, international talent in baseball is highly concentrated. Two countries alone, the DR and Venezuela, are responsible for over 60% of foreign-born major leaguers, and a third, Japan, might constitute most of the remainder if more of its elite players chose to cross over to MLB rather than playing at home. As a result, the WBC is a tournament of haves and have-nots. The majority of teams hail from countries where baseball is relatively little-known, and many cannot boast even a single major leaguer. But the top tier includes a handful of formidable contenders—principally the DR, Venezuela, Japan, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Kingdom of the Netherlands (which includes the baseball-mad Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Aruba)—whose star-studded rosters are easily capable of vanquishing the United States on any given night.

Team USA’s third principal weakness has been turnout. Because no country save America has enough talent to field multiple teams’ worth of stars, foreign-born major leaguers know they will be leaving their homeland at a grave disadvantage if they skip the tournament. As a result, their baseball federations have been able to convince the vast majority of their biggest names to participate in the WBC. In contrast, recruiters for the United States face two disadvantages. Because American players grew up surrounded by MLB and take for granted that their country is the world’s baseball titan, they may feel less pressure to demonstrate its superiority at the WBC. Moreover, the American talent pool is so deep that any individual player can opt out and sleep easy knowing that there are countless other stars able to take his place. This embarrassment of riches has yielded something of a collective-action problem, in which everyone assumes someone else will shoulder the burden and no one does. As a result, Team USA has generally featured only a handful of the country’s absolute best talents.

Although MLB has of course never expressed any preference about the outcome of the tournament, its leaders have probably been quietly pleased by Team USA’s struggles. In the long run, MLB’s biggest business opportunity is expanding its popularity beyond America’s borders, and it founded the WBC not just as a new source of revenue but also with the hope of growing its game abroad. (The Summer Olympics, to which baseball will return in 2020 after a 12-year hiatus, have always been an afterthought: because they occur in the middle of the MLB season, few of the world’s best players participate.) Had the United States simply romped to victory every time, it would have reinforced the notion that baseball was an American sport in which other countries would always be hopelessly overmatched. In contrast, Team USA’s early exits have fostered newfound fervour for the game in the countries that have found themselves in contention for the title. Of the 1.1m fans who attended WBC games, a 23% increase over the figure from 2013, over 400,000 were in the first- and second-round games in Japan; during the championship game, 70% of Puerto Rican televisions that were turned on were tuned to the WBC.

After 11 years, however, the message that baseball is a global sport in which every country has a realistic hope to win has been fully digested. The next step in building up the WBC into a truly marquee event is elevating the quality of play, so that any team that does manage to beat America can claim it has truly vanquished the world’s best. And the responsibility for that rests squarely on the shoulders of the newly crowned world champions. None of the top five American position players, as ranked by their projected 2017 value on the statistical website FangraphsMike Trout, Josh Donaldson, Kris Bryant, Mookie Betts and Bryce Harper—showed up to this year’s tournament. Many American stars have seen it as a mere exhibition, sideshow or distraction—as Noah Syndergaard of the New York Mets said, “Ain’t nobody made it to the Hall of Fame or win a World Series playing in the WBC”.

But now that the baseball world has all but ignored the past three weeks of spring training to focus on the WBC, and that their countrymen who chose to participate have joyfully hoisted the championship trophy while the holdouts play meaningless warm-up games, the tide may be turning. Most importantly, Mr Trout, the game’s greatest player by a large margin, said after watching several exhilarating contests early in the tournament that he would “probably” play in the 2021 WBC. If Mr Trout does indeed deem the WBC worthy of his time, other superstars are likely to follow. Michael Young, a former Team USA player, recently tweeted a prediction that “in 4 years, @USABaseball will put together the best baseball team ever assembled. Ever.”

WBC rosters also suffer from a more fundamental imbalance. For position players, baseball is generally a relatively low-exertion game: they each hit four or five times a game, run the bases once or twice, and might have the ball hit to them a handful of times on defence. However, it is highly taxing for starting pitchers, who generally unleash around 100 pitches at speeds ranging from 80-100 miles (130-160 km) per hour. Even in the MLB season itself, starters are put on tight pitch limits to protect their fragile arms. And when hurlers do get hurt, the consequences are often devastating: recovery time for the Tommy John elbow surgery is usually at least a year, and shoulder injuries frequently end careers. These risks are thought to be exacerbated by the timing of the tournament, which occurs before the MLB season to avoid scheduling disruptions. Coming off a lengthy off-season, pitchers generally use the spring-training period to build up their arm strength. They may be particularly vulnerable to injury if they throw at full velocity without sufficient preparation.

As a result, MLB teams are highly reluctant to expose their vulnerable arms to any additional strain, regardless of insurance coverage. The WBC maintains draconian pitch-count ceilings, particularly in its early rounds, to assuage clubs’ fears. Nonetheless, so far, employers remain unconvinced. Whereas the WBC’s batting lineups were generally packed with stars, the pitching staffs tended to be thin and grim, even for teams besides the United States: for example, neither of Japan’s star major-league starters, Yu Darvish and Masahiro Tanaka, showed up for this version of the Classic.

There is probably no way to resolve this quandary given the current structure of the WBC. But one potential reform proposal offers the possibility of transforming the Classic into a mandatory-attendance event for both pitchers and hitters. The tournament is already split into two stages: a series of qualifiers the year before the main attraction, followed by three rounds of play in March. Given that the climax of the WBC—the knockout stage—is only three games long, it could easily be severed from the earlier contests. MLB already puts its regular season on pause in July for the All-Star break, a four-day hiatus centred around an exhibition game played by its biggest stars. It wouldn’t take much rejiggering to shoehorn the WBC semifinals and finals into this week, when all players are in midseason form and MLB teams might be more willing to let star pitchers throw a single game for their countries. Countries that specialise in pitching would still be at a mild disadvantage, since their top arms would probably remain out of commission in March. But those that did manage to make the final four could play for the world championship at full strength.

The WBC still has a long way to go before it rivals even the MLB playoffs in popularity and revenue, not to mention approaching the level of top-tier international sporting events like the Olympics and the football World Cup. But Rob Manfred, MLB’s commissioner, was visibly delighted at a press conference before the final game at the event’s momentum. Comparing it to the Ryder Cup, an international golf competition that was played for decades before it turned into a must-see fixture on the sport’s calendar, he said the WBC was making remarkable progress. If the 2021 finals feature, say, Mr Trout batting against the DR’s Johnny Cueto, his optimism will be vindicated.

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