Get excited, baseball fans — it’s time for another edition of the World Baseball Classic, which starts in earnest on Thursday with group-stage games at Tokyo Dome between Chinese Taipei and Australia and Czechia and South Korea. Somehow, this will be the sixth playing of the international tournament, which began 20 years ago (sheesh, time flies) as a joint “World Cup” replacement project of the MLB and MLBPA and has grown into one of the most-watched sporting events in the world by total viewership.
Ahead of this year’s WBC, the Polymarket odds have the 2017 champion United States squad set as heavy favorites, with more than double the title probability of any other nation in the field:
If you know anything about the history of teams at the WBC, though, this makes no sense. The U.S. is not the defining team of the event — that distinction belongs to Japan, the defending champions from 2023, and it’s not particularly up for debate.
Japan leads all WBC nations in total wins (30), winning percentage (78.9 percent), run differential (plus-151), gold medals (3), total medals (5) and medal points (11). Not only that, but they have roughly double the cumulative run differential of the next-highest nation (Puerto Rico), triple the gold medals and more than double the medal points of anyone else:
Some of this is because the U.S. didn’t fully take the WBC seriously at first. In fact, the Americans were deeply mediocre over the tournament’s first three iterations, finishing .500 each year en route to a 10-10 overall record and zero medals — finishing no better than fourth place in 2009. The U.S. didn’t always send its best players out of injury concerns ahead of the MLB season, and the players it did send didn’t necessarily view it as an important event.
“You just see how everybody’s passion is totally different than our country,” Team USA member Brandon Phillips said at the time.
To their credit, USA Baseball has improved a lot in recent WBC cycles. In 2017, they rode the dominant pitching of Marcus Stroman to their first-ever championship at the event, beating a Puerto Rico squad that had been the hottest in WBC history to that point in the tournament. The following tourney, in 2023, Team USA went all the way to the title game (where they were favored by the betting odds) before losing an all-time epic to Japan when Shohei Ohtani struck out Mike Trout in a battle of GOATs with the game on the line.
With so many of the best nations of the WBC’s earlier history — Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and especially South Korea — declining over the past few cycles, it makes sense that we would circle Team USA and Japan on the odds sheet as the favorites to meet again, particularly considering that three of the four host sites are in either country (Puerto Rico is the other), and that the WBC has a pronounced home-field advantage effect relative to normal MLB games.
And maybe the Americans should come out ahead in that comparison this time around. Speaking of home-field, each game of the knockouts will be played in the U.S., with Miami hosting the semifinals and final. Talent-wise, the U.S. also may boast its best WBC roster yet; as Will Leitch points out here, Team USA’s pitching (Paul Skenes! Tarik Skubal!) in 2026 is vastly superior to the version that almost beat Japan for the title in 2023. If the two teams had a time machine and played each other, this year’s squad would likely be favored to beat the 2017 team who won it all as well.
But Japan is no slouch, either, even if Ohtani will bat but not pitch in this year’s WBC. While the U.S. looks as dangerous as ever on paper, it’s tough to bet against the team that has the greatest track record of success at this event all-time, has never finished off the podium in a single cycle (the Samurai won bronze in 2013 and 2017), has won 60 percent of all golds ever awarded here, and has roughly double the run differential of any other country in WBC history.
(Plus they have one of the most rabid fan bases of any team in the field — and a track record of treating this event like October baseball.)
Call me crazy, but until someone consistently knocks Japan off its perch, I say the burden of proof remains with the challenger.
Filed under: Baseball, World Baseball Classic