The World Baseball Classic and American Imperialism

Baseball is a game of failure and randomness, and the numbers that coincide from those factors colliding. Baseball players and fans are notoriously superstitious. If one team is down by a notable margin in the sixth inning or later, their fans take their hats off, turn them inside out, and wear them backwards or sideways to try and collectively manifest a comeback. Ichiro Suzuki, one of the greatest hitters of all time, attributes one of his rare slumps to a single point in a single game, when he threw his bat on the ground instead of laying it down gently as he normally does; that being ungrateful towards his bat gave him some kind of bad juju he needed to work off. In 2024, the Minnesota Twins' hitting coach, David Popkins, began one random game in April by taking a plastic-wrapped, gift salami and asking each of his players to tap their bats on it before their at-bats. They hit back-to-back home runs in the sixth inning and another in the eighth. They proceeded to further seal the salami in plastic bags and pack it into a shoe for safekeeping, so they could take it with them on their road games. They won six in a row — a first for the franchise — and then extended that perfect road trip to an 11-game win streak. Baseball is a game of coincidence, which is why it can be difficult not to be conspiratorial, too.

The Dominican Republic was eliminated from the 2026 World Baseball Classic not quite directly by the United States, but certainly in a game against them. In the bottom of the ninth, the U.S. was up 2-1, with one Dominican player on third base. Geraldo Perdomo stepped up to the plate, his team down to their last man, and fought. He worked pitch after pitch from Mason Miller in an at-bat that was nowhere near as long as it actually felt. Perdomo had worked through the fouls and eyed in to catch and then maintain a 3-2 count for himself. One more off pitch from Miller, and Perdomo would both walk to first without needing to hit the ball and earn another chance for the DR. Anything could've happened from there, because anything could've happened to get there.

Baseball is a game of failure and randomness and coincidence, and a lot of dominoes need to fall at just the right time for you and not your opponent. This is a game where the difference between an average batter and a great batter is hitting the ball correctly 5% more of the time — an increase from 25% to 30%. And when the bat meets the ball, it's millimeters that separate an out from a hit or home run. Miller threw a slider at 89 miles per hour, and Perdomo saw it. The bottom dropped out of the ball well before it should've met him in the strike zone, to the point the catcher needed to reach down and snatch it from the air maybe a foot off the ground. The Dominican dugout cheered. Perdomo had earned his walk, and they were alive. He gripped the barrel of his bat hard with one hand, preparing to throw it across the field in celebration. But, after a loud pause from the pitch being caught, the (American) umpire called it a strike. In an instant, Perdomo was out, the game was over, and the Dominican Republic was eliminated from the tournament despite entering this single game 5-0 to the United States' 4-1. This is where conspiracy is born.

It's impossible to follow the World Baseball Classic and not feel that the United States gets some preferential treatment. It is, after all, organized in part by the U.S.'s own Major League Baseball and Major League Baseball Players Association, with at best tangential input from the likes of Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball, La Liga Mexicana de Beisbol, La Liga de Beisbol Profesional de la Republica Dominicana, El Federacion Cubana de Beisbol, Puerto Rico's La Liga de Beisbol Profesional Roberto Clemente, South Korea's KBO League, and on and on. In other words: the World Baseball Classic is an American tournament in which American baseball is played.

Tumba Eso

On Wednesday, March 11th, Cuban left-handed pitcher Liván Moinelo received two pitch clock violations in a row against Canada’s Josh Naylor, walking him on two pitches. So far as we can tell, Moinelo has never played with any pitch clock system before. He was born and raised in Cuba, which does not use it, and for nearly 10 years has been playing in the NPB, which also does not use it. Puerto Rico, where Pool A was hosted, also does not use a pitch clock. One had to be installed into Hiram Bithorn Stadium for the tournament. In the moment, play-by-play announcer Tyler Maun said, “I did ask [Cuban manager] Germán Mesa about that earlier today. We’ve seen some pitch clock issues, we’ve seen some pitchcom issues with Cuba, and he said, ‘I mean, yeah, they’re complicating factors. Our guys haven’t really dealt with this before.’”

Moinelo has probably never used a pitchcom, either; and this is all true for his catcher, fellow Cuban Andrys Perez, as well. A pitchcom is an in- or over-ear device worn by the pitcher and catcher which allows the pair to wirelessly and wordlessly call and confirm which type of pitch will be thrown. Without this system, the typical way a catcher recommends each pitch is by throwing an often complicated series of signals with their body (you’ve probably seen a joke or commercial about this at one point or another). This presents a “problem” — although the batter can’t, the rest of the opposing team can see the catcher and their signals. Through careful observation, that team could figure out which signals mean what, and then use their own signals from the dugout to help their batter. This is called “sign stealing” and it is not actually a problem. Every team signals, and every team knows they’re signaling, because they’re signaling, too. Baseball is a game of smaller games; one of which is an ever-escalating arms race of making, learning, changing, relearning, and elaborating signs.

Signs and sign stealing are part of baseball, but they are problematic to American baseball. Mainly, they can take a long time, and American baseball no longer likes to take a long time. American baseball, being a business, has a schedule to adhere to, because its broadcast partners have other games to play, and their advertisers expect to get what they pay for, and they do not want to give them extra spots for no additional cost. American baseball also dislikes sign stealing because it infringes on its rigid and sometimes nonsensical ideas of fairness.

American baseball is a game about rules. Business-minded American rules, even sports rules, are inflexible to the point of being contractual. But in reality, sports have rules — and baseball has so many rules — only to help guide fair play. If a batter hits a foul ball, that is a strike. The batter is not doing their job of hitting the ball well. However, a batter cannot strike out on a regular foul ball. While the batter is not technically doing their job, the difference between a foul ball and a hit is measured in millimeters, and requires a degree of precision that isn’t always humanly possible (especially against a good pitcher). The batter is partly doing their job. They’re putting the bat to the ball, so they shouldn’t be punished with an out. This is a unilaterally accepted rule. That’s baseball.

Baseball becomes business baseball if, say, a baserunner steals second by sliding in headfirst, and after a challenge by the opposing team, multiple replays from five different camera angles, and 10 minutes of careful consternation by an external review team, they are able to determine that the baserunner’s palm appeared, from some angles, to come off the base by a quarter of an inch, and the baseman appeared to be touching him with a gloved ball at that exact time. The umpires were wrong to call the runner safe, and the runner did a bad job by allowing his hand to come off the bag in a manner undetectable to the naked eye. The runner is punished with an out; the contract said so. And thanks to millions of dollars of usually unused technology, we are able to enforce our contracts with lethal, inhuman precision. The United States loves lethal, inhuman precision.

Less than a week after Cuba was eliminated from the World Baseball Classic, the island was plunged into darkness. Once again, in the mindless pursuit of oil, the United States has only caused further shortages as it begins its slaughter in the Middle East; this time in Iran. It continues to support Israel's genocide and colonization of the region, now reaching Lebanon, displacing and killing its people, too. And once again, the United States is intensifying its blockade of Cuba, cutting off the oil supply to a small island which already struggles with power generation, and which lacks renewable energy sources thanks to persistent American enfeeblement. Even if the technology were to be allowed through the blockade, would pitchcoms be worth the electricity they consume?

Plátano Power

How hard can it be to win a dick-measuring contest when you've spent the last 250+ years cutting off most of your competitors' dicks? When you've invented the sport, and both codify and maintain the ruleset? It's easy to cheer for the underdog when the disparity is so vast — the Olympics have the Jamaican bobsled team, for example, or freestyle swimmer Eric Moussambani, an Equatoguinean who had never seen an Olympic-size pool and struggled to swim its full length.

We know, as we watch, that "third world" nations like Cuba, Jamaica, Equatorial Guinea, or the Dominican Republic shouldn't be able to win anything. They are poor. They have no infrastructure. There's no shortage of clips from the DR of little kids playing with shitty toy bats in alleyways or teenage hopefuls busting their asses throwing tires and practicing with makeshift training gear for pitching practice. We love Dominican baseball especially because, despite it all, they are the best.

Shohei Ohtani set a record in the world of sports with his $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers; and like any MLB record, a Dominican promptly set a new one. A year later, Juan Soto landed himself a $765 million contract with the New York Mets, with none of his salary deferred and additional possible value equaling over $800 million. The story from there is consistent, whether you ask a speculative media or Soto himself: the Mets offered more money — and showed more respect for his family — than the Yankees did. Soto grew up in a Santo Dominguen neighborhood dangerous enough that his mother wouldn't always let him play outside, so he played baseball indoors, alone, with paper balls. His father threw his early batting practices with an improvised form of conditioning: bottle caps instead of balls; smaller targets that are harder to make fly. Soto, Sr. also encouraged his son to throw with his left hand despite being right-handed, because that would give him an advantage (and, therefore, make him massively more appealing as a prospect) should he become a pitcher. His father must've known, even then, that his son could give his family a real chance. And now, as an adult, Soto himself must know that, too. Who cares if the Mets are a losing team? Juan Soto is playing business baseball now.

Like many Dominican-born baseball players, Soto's real shot at generating wealth for his family was in making it to the MLB. And to get into the MLB, he had to get through the farm system. While the farm system is so named to liken its young players to crops, tended to and protected by skilled trainers, the euphemism's double meaning is clear when it comes to the DR. The United States created its banana republics throughout Latin America and the Caribbean because black and brown bodies were cheaper, and their land more readily commandeered for foreign forces. Now, it has its baseball republics: Spanish-speaking colonies repeatedly destabilized by the United States, from which poor bodies, made skilled by hardship, can be harvested. Like sugarcane or textiles, these bodies are less expensive here; more efficient resources ripe for import and refinement to be sold to the people of the United States of America. Juan Soto, like many Dominican baseball players before him, "made it."

Emphasis on "many." The Dominican Republic has the deepest baseball talent pool in the world, producing more professional baseball players per capita in San Pedro alone than entire regions of the United States or Japan. The MLB as it is today could not exist — and certainly not at its present skill level — without the skill of Dominican players, nor their capacity to accept low wages and abuse their bodies for them. Yet it's the Dominican Republic, a country with all the talent but none of the political cache or wealth, which must limit itself to a single team on the world stage, while the United States grants itself three.

The Rules

Of the 30 players Israel fielded for the World Baseball Classic, one was born (and raised) in Israel. The rest are Jewish Americans (or in at least two cases, simply married to Jewish women) born and raised in the United States, whose baseball talents were developed in American schools and academies, who live in the United States, and who play for MLB organizations. Israel is not a baseball country. And, like so many proposed Israeli cultural touchpoints, baseball is not Israeli in origin; its presence in the area predates any recognition of Israel as a state; and it was brought to Israel through Jerusalem, a territory which it militantly occupies but does not own.

When attempting to create an international and nation-based baseball tournament like the World Baseball Classic, there's an immediate and obvious problem: there are not that many countries which play baseball that well. If this tournament needs to be nation-based (and, apparently, it does), then this doesn't fly. Even just to have a basic playoffs format, with both semifinal and quarterfinal rounds, there need to be at least eight participating teams. But that's not really a tournament, is it? A real tournament would have a pool stage, with multiple independent groups of countries playing single games against each other. In the double round robin and Swiss formats, this gives you a clear ranking in each pool, which can determine both which countries move on and at what level they're seeded in the following round, incentivizing competitiveness in pool play. (The WBC, of course, uses the single round robin format for pools, which leads to the atrocious tiebreaker rules they currently utilize). But in order to have pool play, we'd need not just eight participants, but at least 12; and, preferably, 16. There are not 16 competitive baseball countries, with 30 players each, in this world. So, naturally, the WBC actually has 20 participants split into four groups of five, with the fifth nation in each pool joining via a separate qualification tournament for the countries who don't play baseball like that.

To have the truly greatest athletes in the world compete against one another at the highest possible level, some of them would have to compete against their own countrymen as well as the other international representatives. This creates a number of new problems in trying to create a fair competition, which is why the World Baseball Classic simply does not care about any of this. As I've implied, the World Baseball Classic is not about fair competition. Even less than something like the Olympics, it is not about finding the best individuals, nations, or regions at any given sport. It is purely about proliferating American baseball so American businesses can become wealthier. If it was about fair and international competition, it would not be single round robin, the playoff rounds would be determined by best-of series instead of single games, the rules would not be mapped directly to American baseball, pools would be randomized with preferential seeding based on recent performance, and Israel and Italy would not be able to recruit nearly their entire teams from another country.

29 of Team Israel’s 30 fielded players are American; for Italy, that’s 23 of 33. Because of the aforementioned issues with appropriately populating the World Baseball Classic, it has an expansive set of eligibility requirements for any given player to represent any given nation.

This is why Israel and Italy's teams are almost exclusively American. These nations do not have enough world-class baseball players to make up a team, so they're encouraged to recruit them from the United States in order to compete. Italy, as a jus sanguinis nation, has access to any player with a direct, Italian-born or citizen ancestor, with no generational limit. If an Italian man immigrated to America and married an American woman before 1983, that woman would become an Italian citizen, even if her husband later became a citizen of the U.S. Her grandchildren (as well as great-, great-great-, etc.) would be eligible for Italian citizenship, and so would be eligible to represent Italy in the WBC.

I'm not here to comment on the Italian-ness of Italian-Americans. As an American of Irish, Mexican, and Guatemalan descent, I'm certain I've heard all the same bullshit they have. What I will say is that our individual cultures are unique, and much of that culture has been retained even through generations of immigration. But it has also been changed by time and distance, and the influence of both broad American culture and the many other immigrant cultures which now neighbor our own. Being Anything-American isn't about being less Anything, but about being a new thing that happens to be uniquely American. Why another nation should be allowed to claim that specifically in a competition of nations is difficult to explain.

Things are a bit different for Israel, since it's a genocidal ethnostate. Morally speaking, either one of these facts should see them excluded from all international competition, but clearly that isn't going to happen any time soon. What is so disturbing about their inclusion in the World Baseball Classic in particular is that, per the WBC's strained eligibility rules, it explicitly affirms and condones Israel's position as an ethnostate. The World Baseball Softball Confederation sees that Israeli citizenship is directly dependent on ethnicity and doesn't blink. The WBSC sees that Israeli citizenship deliberately excludes Arabs from its annexed lands and marks them as citizens of no nation to be disposed of and says "We can't wait to have you."

This is why it is so disgusting when Israel and Italy are sold by the announcers and the press as "underdogs." They, as Americans playing for wealthy, colonial nations, have every advantage in the world; while the United States has intervened in, occupied, overthrown, invaded, bombed, and otherwise controlled every single Caribbean and Latin American representative in the World Baseball Classic. And now that the United States hosts its own international tournament with its own rules for its own sport on its own broadcasts, it can field itself thrice, and cast its own as the perennial favorites as well as the romanticized longshots. The press and announcers make clear, over and over, how earth-shattering it would be if Israel or Italy were to beat the likes of Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Venezuela; yet paradoxically, the latter three beating the United States would be an upset. This is why it is always so, so gratifying to watch the Americans lose, whichever jerseys they’re wearing.