Atlanta Braves Post Mortem on the WBC

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Mar 22, 2017; Los Angeles, CA, USA; USA raises the championship trophy following the 8-0 victory against Puerto Rico in the 2017 World Baseball Classic at Dodger Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports /

What Was Wrong With WBC?

Unfortunately, there was quite a bit – based mostly on one key issue.

This tournament was really more like baseball with a governor on it – devices were in place to control the game. That’s unfortunate, for such things probably changed the outcome of some contests.

But let me count the ways of my concerns…

Everything revolved around pitching restrictions. Pitch count limits, innings limits, brokered deals between teams and pitchers, guys who could return and those who could not. This means that the best teams were never actually on the field, but instead there had to be a choreographed dance to make sure any given team would have enough pitching on a given day.
This includes the extra innings madness. Never mind that the semi-finals and finals were “1 and done” contests and not a series of games between two worthy foes, but because of pitching concerns, any game running past 10 innings was decided by a playground-style rule: put 2 runners on and hope for the best.

Look: I get it. Because pitchers aren’t being allowed to go as long as they can, this overtime rule was needed. But heck: you may as well flip a coin or use Strat-O-Matic cards to determine the winner and kill the idea that this was somehow a fair means of determining a winner.

It was worse that a soccer or hockey shootout. Worse than football’s Kansas tie-breakers.

But if we have to resort to such gimmickry, shouldn’t that tell you that there’s a problem?

There were anecdotal reports that we had WBC teams calling up the MLB parent clubs begging to use a player for one more inning. We had MLB teams calling WBC teams wondering if ‘their players’ were getting enough work in.

We had a multi-hemisphere tournament in which teams would play for 3 days and then shut down for a week. We had MLB Spring Training clubs that were kind of put on hold for a couple of weeks – much to the delight of minor league players who saw some extra action.

We had games on way too late for East Coast US viewers… maybe to accommodate the Far East fans… but the US market shouldn’t have been hurt like that, either.

And we have Spring Training extended for an extra week… much to the delight of the local vendors and those renting out space for the season.

But there are ways to fix this.

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