CLEARWATER, Fla. — How did you spend your Wednesday night? I spent mine counting the number of Colombian baseball players I could name while sitting at a bar that shares a parking lot with a Shell station and a laundromat. This was a few miles from the Tampa airport, near the hotel where I spent the night before heading to the Phillies spring training complex the following morning. There was an ash tray on the table and an RV in the parking lot and a World Baseball Classic game on television. It all seemed to fit.
Or, so I thought.
See, I’d always been a bit of a cynic about the WBC. The concept itself is fine. Nobody can deny the logical appeal of crowning a true world champion. Take the best baseball players in every baseball-playing country in the world and have them compete in a winner-take-all-tournament. It makes perfect sense. It sounds exciting. It just doesn’t work.
At least, it doesn’t work the way Major League Baseball and the World Baseball Softball Confederation try to pretend that it works. This year, the sponsoring bodies’ promotional blitz includes a television commercial in which an announcer declares, “The calendar may say March, but the baseball feels like October.” Except, the baseball doesn’t feel at all like October. Unless the October in question belongs to the Pirates.
That line was still echoing in my head on Thursday morning when Garrett Stubbs arrived at his locker in the Phillies clubhouse at BayCare Ballpark. A week earlier, his participation in this year’s World Baseball Classic had come to a premature end due to some knee soreness that developed while playing third base and hitting a game-winning double in Team Israel’s opening-game win over Nicaragua. Stubbs, a Jewish backup catcher from California who is also apparently the best corner infielder in the Middle East, sat out Israel’s remaining games and returned to Clearwater for an MRI. As he’d expected, the medical test revealed nothing serious.
There’s a fundamental problem with the WBC, and Stubbs laid it bare as he talked about the injury.
“If this was regular season, I’d be out there playing,” he said. “But with the circumstances and what we have going on here, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice any sort of prolonged time away from playing during the regular season.”
Clearly, this was the smart move for Stubbs. He has a chance to earn himself a good deal of money with another solid season. This is the last season before he is eligible for arbitration, which means any 2023 production will factor into his 2024 salary. A backup catcher’s best ability is availability. For a 30-year-old with 208 career plate appearances and less than $2 million in career earnings, the priority is clear.
The real paradox is that Stubbs is almost certainly making the decision that the Phillies themselves would have him make. After all, the Phillies are a World Series contender that have invested $700,000 in Stubbs with the thought that he will contribute to the effort. They would much rather Stubbs be healthy for the regular season rather than risk injury in March. At the same time, they are 1/30th of Major League Baseball, which is trying to sell people on the World Baseball Classic’s playoff-like significance.
Stubbs may be a bit player in the Phillies’ ambitions, but that speaks to the point. Imagine how the Mets must feel after losing All-Star closer Edwin Díaz to a knee injury that he suffered while celebrating Puerto Rico’s win over the Dominican Republic on Wednesday. This isn’t just a player we are talking about. This is a $100 million investment. At that level of money, even a minor level of risk can feel intolerable. If it doesn’t make sense for the players or the teams to play October baseball in March, then why even try to make it happen?
At least, that’s what I thought on Wednesday night. But then came Thursday morning.
See, as Stubbs talked about his own injury, the conversation gradually turned to the experience he’d had while playing. He was a California kid who’d never set foot in Israel. But after his game-winning hit, he found himself bombarded with messages on social media from fans in his adoptive country.
“It really felt like everyone was playing for a little bit more than themselves or the guy next to them,” Stubbs said. “It felt like you were playing for a whole country, which gives you a whole different brand of baseball.”
He talked about the impact that Team Israel’s visibility has had on growing the sport of baseball in the country. He talked about the intensity of players from countries like Colombia and Nicaragua who do not have a major league season in front of them. The more he talked, the more he sounded like a player who was actually an ambassador.
I suppose that’s the point that us cynics should consider. The point of the World Baseball Classic isn’t to appeal to those of us inside of Major League Baseball’s orbit. The point is to expand that orbit and broaden the fan base so that it someday includes folks who are currently outside of it.
It does not matter if it doesn’t feel serious to you. That’s not who it’s meant for. Rather, it’s meant for people like the middle-aged woman who was mixing drinks at a hole-in-the-wall bar on Wednesday night. She didn’t seem terribly interested in the U.S.-Colombia game. But she was wearing a Puerto Rico jersey.
