The finale of the World Baseball Classic is tonight, and I am braying for the blood of Team USA.
The World Baseball Classic is a very silly baseball exhibition where teams are formed around countries, kind of like the Olympics. It takes place every four years. Instead of playing for the Dodgers, baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani represented team Japan, and his teammate Will Smith is on Team USA. It’s also just,\ not very serious, which makes it a low stakes way to enjoy baseball before I become the world’s enemy for the sin of being married to a lifelong Dodgers fan.
While there are definitely enough players from, say, the Dominican Republic or Korea to create homegrown teams playing for their country, there’s also teams from places like Italy and Great Britain, who don’t have a culture of playing baseball at all. Amusingly, Great Britain’s eligibility requirements extended to not just people from Britain, but anyone from their former colonies, meaning that the team had two different players who represented Great Britain because their mothers were from Hong Kong.
Tonight is the final match up for the series, and it comes down to the genuinely surprising match up of Team USA vs. Team Venezuela. (Team Japan was knocked out by Team Venezuela earlier in the series, a huge upset given that Japan has won the series three times, including the most recent WBC in 2023). Despite how much fun I’ve had watching the World Baseball Classic, Team USA has been a thorn in my side the entire time.
Because of how unserious this tournament is, most of the teams had a little fun with it. Team Great Britain had a plastic sword to knight players who got a home run, and Team Italy had an espresso machine in the dugout, brewing up shots for their own homerun tradition. Pretty much all Team USA has done is celebrate the United States military. They keep giving interviews about loving the troops. Pitcher Paul Skenes has dropped multiple sound bites about pitching for the baseball team in the US Air Force Academy. One player has worn a shirt with the phrase “front towards enemy” on it, which is also printed on claymore mines. They even invited former Navy Seal Robert O’Neill into the locker room for a pep talk. O’Neill’s claim to fame is that he was part of the team that assassinated Osama Bin Laden, and also for telling this random person on Twitter that they would have been his concubine in Ancient Rome.
It is frankly hard to enjoy the fact that Team USA has made it to the final knowing how much they love the military while we are bombing the fuck out of Iran in what is clearly an illegal war for oil. I’ve been through 9/11 once, and I have had my fill of jingoistic death cults. I knew that the vibes were off the first time I saw how Team USA fans dress for the games. While watching Great Britain vs. USA, I noticed that while fans of Team Great Britain sometimes painted their face with the St. George cross or dressed like lions, fans of Team America were in cosplay of the Founding Fathers.
Do we not have other cultural symbols to be proud of? Why not evoke hot dogs or apple pie or, fuck, even cowboys? Why not dress like a Marvel character—at least that is an American cultural product that doesn’t give me second hand embarrassment. No, apparently, it’s all the George Washington and tomahawk missiles. Our government is a collapsing house of cards led by an actively decaying man who has appeared in the Epstein files over 5,000 times and there’s no reason to celebrate it. Please, Team Venezuela, kick our ass tonight. We truly deserve it.
