March 9: Shugo Maki of Japan celebrates after hitting a home run from Su Changlong of China in the 8th inning. EUGENE HOSHIKO, AP
March 8, 2023
By Lewis Rubman
For the first time since its inception in 2006, the World Baseball Classic will not stage its semi-final and final games in California. San Diego hosted the first championship round, followed by Los Angeles in 2009, San Francisco in 2013, and then it was back to Dodger Stadium in 2017. This year the closest Bay Area fans will get to the action will be Phoenix, one of the four venues for the first round.
Teams representing the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, and Great Britain will duke it out in Chase Field. This quintet has been designated as Group C. The teams with the two best won-lost records in this round will advance to the quarter finals, AKA round 2, where they’ll face the two top finishers of Groups A,B, and D.
Now, let’s take a look at those groups.
Group A, consisting of the Netherlands, Cuba, Italy, Panama and what the organizers refer to as Chinese Taipei opened the action when the Netherlands beat Cuba 4-0 in Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium on what was March 7 here, but the afternoon of March 8 in Taiwan. In what was the nightcap in Asia, visiting Panama pummelled the host team, 12-5, but outhit them by only one run, 14-13.
No other scores were in for either of the Asian venues when I took a break for packing my bags for Phoenix to write this. Group A’s next round, AKA the quarter finals, will be played in Taichung, with the sole surviving squad moving on to Miami for the championship round, i.e., the semi-final and final series.
Japan, Korea, Australia, China, and the Czech Republic make up Group B. Their first game is scheduled to start in the Tokyo Dome at 4:00 pm here on a west coast Wednesday afternoon, about two hours from now, and will feature Australia and Korea. The advancing teams will remain in Tokyo for the quarter-finals and then go to Miami for the semi-final and final rounds.
Group D consists of Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Israel, and Nicaragua. They’ll play their games in Miami, starting with the Puerto Rico-Nicaragua match up at 9:00, Pacific time, on March 11. The team that wins this Group D first round at Loan Depot Park in Miami will continue to play there as long as they remain in the running.
All of the above invites a few questions. Among them are how does a team qualify, what is the basis on which a qualifying team is assigned to one group rather than another, how are teams ranked with their pools?
There are three criteria for qualification. They are
• The host country automatically qualifies. As with sausages, it’s best not to inquire about what goes into making the decision of which country that will be.
• Any team that reached the 2017 semi-finals makes it into the first round in 2023 and will be the top seed in its group.
• This point is delicate. MLB, the WBC’s parent organization, describes it this way: “… the remaining teams will be assigned based on December 31, 2021, WBSC [World Baseball Softball Confederation] rankings in order to guaranteed [sic] competitive balance. Commercial, geographic and geopolitical considerations may also be applied to this process.”
Let that last sentence sink in. When you’ve done, you can clear your mind by glancing at MLB.com’s ranking of the top ten teams. They are
1) The Dominican Republic
2) The USA
3) Japan
4) Puerto Rico
5) Mexico
6) Venezuela
7) Cuba
8) Canada
9) Italy
10) Korea.
I chose this source because I couldn’t find the final 2021 WSBC ratings and, in any case, 2022 was not a good year for lower level baseball and softball. I don’t know how accurate this MLB.com table is, but I suspect that it’s relevant that, of the four previous WBC titles, Japan has won two and the Dominican Republic and the United States have won the two remaining crowns. Cuba, the Netherlands, and Korea also have had notable success in the tournament.
In my next article, I’ll discuss, among other things, some thorny “geographic and geopolitical considerations” that could affect the inclusion and group placement of a country as well as individual players’ eligibility to play for any given team. After that, I plan to send two more dispatches before I begin reporting on the games of the Phoenix round on March 11. They will deal with other tournament rules and with the representation of players from bay area teams in the WBA.
Lewis Rubman is covering the World Baseball Classic for http://www.sportsradioservice.com
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