Before the World Baseball Classic final began on Tuesday night, FOX pregame host Derek Jeter made a bold claim. He said, “I think the people who say (winning the WBC is) bigger than the World Series never played in the World Series.” A good person to test this claim against would be Salvador Pérez, who knows both the pain of making the final out of a World Series loss and winning the World Series MVP after a win.

Luckily for us, Pérez was on the pregame show earlier that very day to offer these thoughts. I apologize for not having the exact quotes, and I’m going to have to paraphrase, but he said something like, “I would crawl through a dry ocean bed of scorpions and broken glass to win this,” and then he crawled through the television, into your home, like the girl from “The Ring,” and got within a millimeter of your face to whisper, “I want to win this so, so much.”

Some of the details might be off, but you get the basic idea. It was a big, big deal for Venezuela to win the WBC, and the celebrations were as energetic and heartfelt as expected. And at the risk of shoehorning a Giants narrative into all of this, it’s hard not to look at the WBC final through a Giants lens. Their biggest offseason lineup addition, Luis Arraez, carried the Venezuelan flag and led his team onto the field, an honor that speaks volumes. Reliever José Buttó got some of the biggest outs of the entire WBC final, ending his Classic by retiring Aaron Judge on a grounder to third with two outs, preserving a two-run lead.

However, it’s not enough to point out that some Giants players contributed to the Venezuelan championship. No, that’s the bare minimum. They pay me to shoehorn Giants content into everything, so we can’t stop there. If you step back about 40 yards and turn your head at just the right angle, you can make some forced comparisons between the Venezuelan national team and the 2026 Giants.

I know that I can. And sometimes those forced comparisons can make a writer look pretty danged smart, so let’s try it again.

The Giants will go as far as their lineup will take them

I was assigned a very, very large project over a month ago, and in my infinite wisdom, I planned for it as if it were a quick li’l article. The result was me learning a LOT about the teams and players of the World Baseball Classic in a hilariously compressed timeframe.

One of the tasks was to sort the teams into tiers, and the Venezuelan team immediately jumped out to me as analogous to what the Giants are hoping to do. They couldn’t worry about the rosters of the other countries, even if they’re overstuffed with superstars and future Hall of Famers in a way that few rosters in baseball history have ever been. All they could do was hope their aggregated bunch of legitimate major-league talent played as well as they were capable of, and see where that took them.

It took them all the way to a championship. The WBC is obviously more of a crapshoot than a 162-game season. Still, if you believe the Giants have a chance at the postseason — and even the most cynical fans would suggest they have a half-decent chance — then you have to believe they could cause the same kind of chaos in a tournament setting. Baseball encourages that sort of malarky and general nonsense, you know.

If it gets that far, it’ll probably be because Arraez is having the kind of season that makes everyone wonder why he had to settle for a short-term deal late in the offseason. The Giants’ 2B/1B/DH and possible leadoff hitter had a .308/.367/.692 slash line in the tournament, and his production included two homers, four doubles and 10 RBIs.

The Venezuelan team built a powerful lineup around Arraez, and they got timely dingers. They had a lot of good players, and that really is the spiciest adjective you can use for a lot of them. Ezequiel Tovar is a good player, same as Maikel Garcia or Wilyer Abreu. You can spend an hour with a thesaurus, but don’t bother. Lotta good players is what we’re looking at here. Only one of them (Ronald Acuña Jr.) is the type of player that you might find in a book like Baseball Superstars: Play Ball!, available at Scholastic Book Fairs everywhere.

Sounds like the Giants, who have a few players who’ve made All-Star Games without getting hassled at airports outside of the Bay Area. The part of Acuña is still unfilled, and how, but the Venezuelan team was always built on an offense-first attack. It worked. That’s the plan for the Giants.

A starting pitcher you’ve heard of reclaimed his past form

Eduardo Rodríguez doesn’t have to be close to the end of his career, just because he’s had two iffy seasons (39 starts, 5.02 ERA) with the Diamondbacks. He’s starting to drift into the Patrick Corbin zone, where the innings eaten might not be worth the cost, but he was outstanding for the Tigers in 2023. That’s how he got his multi-year deal in the first place, and his velocity and bat-missing potential are just about as robust as they were back then.

If Rodríguez were to have a comeback season, it would surprise exactly no one. It would be a normal baseball thing, the same sort that happens a few dozen times every season. Remember that guy who used to be good? Well, you’ll never believe it, but he’s good again.

The Giants have Logan Webb, so they’re already outpacing this part of the analogy, but they also have pitchers who’ve experienced bittersweet success, where they’ve proven that they can retire major-league hitters at their best, but have troubles sustaining that form because of injury or other reasons.

If a couple of those types come through in 2026, the Giants instantly look more formidable. Tyler Mahle has a 0.00 ERA and a 3-0 record in 10 spring innings. It’s hard to ignore the seven walks, but it’s just as hard to ignore all of the outs (including 13 strikeouts). A comeback performance from him, or a starting pitcher like him, would propel the Giants forward like Rodríguez’s southpaw craftiness did for Team Venezuela.

The bullpen is going to scare the bejeepers out of you in the middle innings

Earlier, we wrote about Buttó’s success against Judge in a crucial spot. There is additional context to this story. Here’s how the at-bat went, courtesy of MLB.com’s Gameday feed:

You can’t just say that Buttó got lucky. His whole deal is that he’s hard to square up. He walks too many batters, and he doesn’t miss as many bats as you want from a high-leverage reliever, but he puts baseballs in a slightly different spot than where the hitters think they’re going to be, and he’s built a career out of it.

However, at the risk of being a rebel in the scouting community, I would like to suggest that the way to get Judge out is not with a get-it-in slider after falling behind 2-0. And, if we can agree on that, it’s also not considered “best practices” to follow that pitch with another slider in the middle of the strike zone. We’re talking right in the middle, just on a tee, hoo doctor, center cut, right there. And, again, the hitter was Aaron Judge.

Yep. This might be something Giants fans will need to get used to, a middle reliever stressing them out like that, even if the results are occasionally (often?) successful. Check the schedule, too. Judge and the Yankees will start the season in San Francisco. That’s a lot of time for Judge to think about that hanging slider.

It’s hard to argue with results, and Buttó had a 0.00 ERA in the WBC. Other relievers didn’t. And it was enough to get Venezuela a lot further than folks were expecting. A lot further. They looked familiar, for better and for worse. If it all works out, the “better” is all you’ll remember.