Certain segments of American baseball fans and the American baseball establishment are struggling to accept an increasingly obvious reality: The World Baseball Classic matters a lot, even if it doesn’t matter all that much to them.
Prior to last night’s championship clash between the USA and Venezuela, Derek Jeter, who played in the first iteration of the WBC back in 2006, dismissed the tournament in a typically American way, which is to say a typically arrogant way:
It’s not at all surprising that Derek Jeter values the World Series over the World Baseball Classic. And I would never tell him he is wrong to do so. Meaning does not inherently exist in anything. Meaning is not something that can be objectively measured like the weather or the decibel level of the crowd in Miami last night. The meaning of anything in the world — whether we’re talking about a baseball tournament or a favorite tee-shirt — is determined by what’s in someone’s heart.
But while I would not tell Derek Jeter that he is wrong to value the World Series over the World Baseball Classic, I would tell him that he is objectively wrong to say that anyone who has played in a World Series finds more meaning in that than in the WBC. We already know this is not the case. Kiké Hernandez, who has played in more World Series than any other active player, directly told this to to all of us, Jeter included:
Hernandez’s sentiment is plainly shared by the vast majority of non-American ballplayers. Anyone who watched these games could see that. They tried to tell us this with every bat they flipped, with every dugout rail they hopped, with every tear that they shed on the field — whether those tears came from Shohei Ohtani before the first game, or Salvador Perez after the last. That Derek Jeter refuses to listen to them is disappointing but not surprising. Indeed, the dismissal of these players’ own feelings is foundational to how the global baseball industry works.
The economic system that controls global baseball is a product of American economic imperialism. As with bananas in the Caribbean, pineapples in the Hawaiian islands, or oil in the Middle East, America has used its economic might to shape the way that baseball is both produced and consumed around the world, ensuring that the vast majority of money spent on baseball flows into the pockets of American ownership interests.
Venezuelan big leaguers are not victims under this system. Far from it. The exploitation of their talents by American capitalism has made many of them millionaires, far more financially comfortable than just about anyone else in their home country, where the median annual income isn’t enough to cover one month’s rent for a studio apartment in many parts of the United States.
But Venezuelan baseball culture is a victim of this system. Venezuela does not have a thriving and independent domestic baseball league that provides full-time jobs for coaches, groundskeepers, statisticians, scouts, writers, TV personalties, and social media influencers, like we have here in America. Venezuelan fans cannot take the train to the ballpark and buy a ticket to watch Ranger Suárez pitch to Ronald Acuña, Jr. Venezuelan ballplayers cannot make a living in their home country. They are instead given no other option but to ply their trade in a foreign land — one that is increasingly hostile and unwelcoming to them, one that sees them as lesser and now harasses and intimidates them as a matter of government policy, as the hero of last night’s game, Eugenio Suárez, has frankly and honestly discussed.
That Venezuelans do not have a viable baseball industry of their own is not because Venezuelans care less about baseball than Americans do. On a per capita basis, they almost certainly care a lot more. It’s because might makes right — whether that might comes in the form of the dollar or the gun. The economic realities of the world force Venezuelan ballplayers to not only leave their country to work, but to check meaningful parts of their culture and identify at the border in exchange for a paycheck. They do so largely without complaint, just as you and I likely would if the economic situation were reversed. But that doesn’t mean they don’t make real sacrifices. In order to do their jobs they leave all they know from birth behind and live a rootless life of baseball nomadism. They are forced to endure a kind of cultural loneliness.
What Derek Jeter can’t see is that it is precisely this cultural loneliness that gives the WBC so much meaning to many of these players. For one month every few years they are with their people. They don’t have to speak someone else’s language, eat someone else’s food, or adhere to someone else’s unwritten rules of behavior and decorum. For one month they are free to be fully Venezuelan and fully a ballplayer at the same time. Instead of sublimating their cultural identity in order to play baseball, they get to express their cultural identity through baseball.
The World Baseball Classic does nothing to break the American economic stranglehold over the global baseball industry. That was Rob Manfred handing out the medals last night, after all. The WBC is owned and operated by American ownership interests, and they do it for no other reason than it makes them even more money.
But what the WBC does do is break the cultural hegemony that America has always wielded over the game. This manifests itself not only in the way the game is played on the field during the tournament, but how the tournament is held in the hearts of those who are playing it. The American baseball establishment still controls the baseball industry, but it doesn’t control what baseball means. These players have decided that the WBC means more to them than the World Series. And because meaning is something that only exists in the heart, they are right.
