The World Baseball Classic Was Born From Baseball's Olympic Exile

The World Baseball Classic—now the most prestigious international baseball tournament on the planet—exists because baseball got kicked out of the Olympics. In 2005, the International Olympic Committee voted to drop baseball and softball from the Summer Games after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, leaving the sport without a global stage. That same year, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig announced a new tournament that had been quietly in development for two years: the World Baseball Classic. The problem was that almost nobody in Major League Baseball actually wanted it. Team owners panicked about injury risks to their star players during spring training, when bodies were still conditioning for the 162-game season ahead. Several marquee names refused to participate outright—Barry Bonds dismissed it as "no big deal," while Manny Ramirez, Pedro Martinez, and Vladimir Guerrero all dropped out. The MLBPA and MLB spent months negotiating insurance agreements to cover hundreds of millions of dollars in player salary liability, and separate negotiations with Japanese and Korean professional leagues over scheduling and player availability took another four months to finalize. To protect pitchers, organizers created strict pitch-count rules unlike anything in professional baseball: 65 pitches per game in the first round, 80 in the second round, and 95 in the championship round, with mandatory rest days after throwing 50 or more pitches. A mercy rule—unheard of in MLB—allowed games to end early if one team led by 15 runs after five innings or 10 runs after seven. When the inaugural tournament finally launched in March 2006 with 16 teams, skeptics called it a glorified exhibition. Japan silenced them by winning it all, defeating Cuba 10-6 in the final at Petco Park in San Diego, with Daisuke Matsuzaka earning MVP honors. Japan won again in 2009—Ichiro Suzuki delivering a two-run walk-off single in the tenth inning of the final against South Korea at Dodger Stadium. The Dominican Republic ran a perfect 8-0 through the 2013 tournament, and the United States finally won in 2017. The tournament that nobody wanted has become the sport's most emotionally charged event—the one competition where players who earn tens of millions of dollars cry openly on the field, because they're not playing for a contract. They're playing for their country.