I was afraid of flying until a pilot with whom I grew up set me straight. A plane wants to stay in the air, he said, comfortingly. A plane’s wing can bend at nearly a 90 degree angle and not snap, he said, less comfortingly. A plane will only crash when a thousand things go wrong or someone’s trying to make it crash, the same way Major League Baseball games will be played minus a few hundred thousand raindrops stop it or a group of owners try to stop it from happening. Which, after the 2026 season, is exactly where we’re headed.
There’s almost certainly going to be a lockout after this year because Rob Manfred and his band of miserable men are sick of what the Dodgers have done to the sport: spent the most money, in the smartest ways, and built the best organization backing it up. They’ve won two World Series in a row, and it hardly matters to baseball as a whole that the second was by the skin of their teeth – what matters is they signed Kyle Tucker after signing Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki and Tyler Glasnow and
You get it. You might also intuitively understand that this is good for baseball, the same way it was when the Yankees did it in the late 90s and the Red Sox joined the fun in the early aughts. A rising tide lifts all boats, and the best way to raise the tide is with a hose full of money. (And PEDs, TBH, but that’s an issue largely consigned to the past, at least outside of the Profar household.) But here’s the thing about most baseball owners: they are very stupid and selfish, so they are intent on taking their frustrations out on the sport and its fans by depriving us of good baseball.
Make no mistake: Post-lockout, the sport will be worse for wear. Or the league will be, I should say. Baseball – the sport of baseball, not Major League Baseball – is just fine when done right, and the World Baseball Classic does it right. There’s nothing like it. If the plane that is MLB wants to stay in the air but is forced down, the WBC is its black box. You can’t make the whole plane out of it, but if you could, you would.
Last time around, we were treated to one of the single greatest at-bats to happen in the history of the sport to end the whole shebang, with Shohei Ohtani striking out then-Angels teammate and fellow league MVP Mike Trout on a 3-2 pitch to end it all. This year, in something of a synecdoche (if I’m using that word right, which I mightn’t be), the whole tournament seemed to have been made out of the Ohtani-Trout at-bat, with a breathtakingly close or raucous game happening every day.
All of that was reaffirmed last night, when Venezuela absorbed a momentous and aesthetically beautiful game-tying homer in the bottom of the 8th inning to rebound on the shoulders of Eugenio Suarez and defeat the country that kidnapped their leader months earlier on its home soil. From a pure baseball perspective, the Ohtani/Trout moment is fairly unstoppable, but internationally and locally, this one was more momentous. Internationally because of said kidnapping. Locally because this tournament and this game was teeming with current and former Red Sox. Roman Anthony – batting directly behind Kyle Schwarber and Alex Bregman – struck out to end it, in a game started by Eduardo Rodriguez, starring Wilyer Abreu, that was lost by Garrett Whitlock. It was dizzying. Plus Aaron Judge choked. What else could you want?
Well, you could do the thing dumbasses do when a plane crashes, and ask why they don’t make the whole thing out of the black box. And again, it’s simply because it’s not necessary. The plane wants to stay in the air. Baseball wants to thrive. The WBC is great because it’s scarce, but the sport shouldn’t suffer in its absence. It’s not suffering in its absence. If it’s suffering, it’s because the people running it want it to suffer. The WBC is a permanent reminder of what we stand to lose.
