Since the baseball offseason has run cold for the moment, let’s pivot to the 2026 World Baseball Classic.
Per Meghan Montemurro in the Tribune, the Cubs might send quite a few players to the WBC:
As many as eight Cubs players might be on WBC rosters: Pete Crow-Armstrong and Matthew Boyd (U.S.), Seiya Suzuki and Shota Imanaga (Japan), Owen Caissie (Canada), Daniel Palencia (Venezuela), Miguel Amaya (Panama) and Javier Assad (Mexico).
The national teams for Palencia, Amaya and Assad still need approval
from the Cubs for those players to participate in the WBC, which will be played March 5-17 at various sites. The Cubs intend to support any players who wish to represent their countries and are working through logistics.
“In general the WBC is a great experience for a lot of guys,” manager Craig Counsell said Tuesday at the winter meetings. “And for some, I would recommend against it. But for most, I think it’s a great experience.”
PCA and Boyd were officially added to the Team USA roster last month. The article says that some of the other players aren’t officially on their countries’ teams yet, but are expected to be. As noted in the article, Imanaga was the starting pitcher for Japan in the 2023 WBC championship game. He threw two innings and allowed one run in that game that famously ended with Shohei Ohtani striking out Mike Trout to win the tournament for Japan.
As noted in Montemurro’s article, the WBC will take place over a two-week period from early to mid March. This means that any players who make it all the way to the championship round will miss that much of Spring Training, though of course they will be playing in competitive games during that span.
Two of the four pools will be held in the USA, one in Houston, the other in Miami, if you have any interest in attending. The others will be in San Juan and Tokyo. I have attended preliminary round games of WBC tournaments before and they are always great fun. The players are very much into playing for their countries and this is a great way to promote baseball internationally. You can find much more information on the WBC here, and on March 3 the Cubs will play an exhibition game against Team Italy at Sloan Park. You can get tickets for that game here.
Josh and I are both big fans of the WBC so we will have extensive coverage of the tournament here at BCB. If you haven’t checked it out in the past I highly recommend it. It’s great baseball.
