Five Obstacles That Could Stop Team USA From Winning the World Baseball Classic

Welcome to the first edition of Verducci’s View, a new weekly baseball newsletter from Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci. Every Monday, Tom will empty out his notebook and cover MLB’s hottest topics, provide in-depth analysis through both text and video breakdowns, look forward to what’s worth watching during the week and more.

Playoff intensity baseball in March returns this week with the sixth edition of the World Baseball Classic. Team USA has its most loaded roster ever, featuring four of the top five 2025 AL MVP finishers—Aaron Judge, Cal Raleigh, Bobby Witt Jr., and Tarik Skubal—NL Cy Young Award winner Paul Skenes and NL MVP runner-up Kyle Schwarber. Anything less than gold will be a disappointment.

What could possibly go wrong? Here are potential problems for Team USA:

1. Pitching limits. Pitchers’ outings are limited by rules governing pitch counts and rest, as well as by instructions from their MLB teams. Skubal is expected to make only one start. Skenes, and all pitchers, are limited to 65 pitches in pool play. Pitching depth, not front-line starters, usually decide these games. The losing pitchers in Team USA’s past seven WBC losses were Nick Martinez, Merrill Kelly, Andrew Miller, Marcus Stroman, R.A. Dickey, Craig Kimbrel and Ryan Vogelsong.

2. Strikeouts. Team USA traditionally is built more on power than contact. It lost the 2023 WBC Final to Japan, 3–2, while scoring on two solo homers, going 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position and striking out eight times. Team USA has five players with worse than average strikeout rates last year: Schwarber, Raleigh, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Judge and Bryce Turang.

3. Japan. Even with DH-only Shohei Ohtani and Roki Sasaki and Yu Darvish not pitching for the defending champs, Samurai Japan has a loaded, splitter-heavy pitching staff, led by Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the best big-game pitcher in the world, and Hiromi Itoh, the strike-throwing 2025 Sawamura Award winner in NPB. The team features nine MLB players, a record for team Japan. Most impressively, Japan knows how to play tournament-style baseball. It is 30–8 in WBC play, including five losses by one run and none by more than three runs.

4. Dominican Republic. The brackets are set up for a USA-Japan Final rematch, but the Dominicans (on the same side of the bracket as Japan) pose the biggest threat to that idea. Their loaded lineup can start eight players who received MVP votes last year. Venezuela is the other serious threat to the USA-Japan rematch.

5. Spoilers. Mexico had two leads on Japan in the 2023 semis, including one in the ninth. Six countries have made it to the five previous finals, including as many appearances by Puerto Rico as the USA (two). A possible spoiler this year is Italy, which boasts one of its better lineups with Kyle Teel, Vinnie Pasquantino, Jac Caglianone, Dominic Canzone and Jon Berti—as well as the best dugout espresso machine in baseball, though gli Azzurri in the last WBC had to make do with paper cups rather than ceramic.

The Meyer Factor

MLB Players Association interim executive director Bruce Meyer during spring training March 2026. — MLB Players Association executive director Bruce Meyer has been doing the rounds at spring training. | Evan Petzold / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Until substantive labor talks begin, it’s too soon to be certain how the switch from Tony Clark to Bruce Meyer as executive director of the players association affects the chances of a new collective bargaining agreement while extending the record 31-year streak without losing games to labor strife. But ominously, Meyer is on record wishing the players shut down the game in 2022 on the chance of getting more at the bargaining table.

Without Clark, a former player, will union leadership be more hawkish? Will Meyer and the eight-member executive subcommittee, which voted 8–0 to reject the CBA in 2022, hold more sway over the rank and file? Meyer was the lead negotiator on that CBA as he will be on this one. The difference now is he has more authority.

Meyer has dismissed criticism that he is too influenced by agent Scott Boras, complaints he told reporters recently “are mostly originated by the league.”

Meyer did make a rare appearance at an arbitration hearing—the one of Skubal, a Boras client. Boras asked Meyer to deliver the final five minutes of the 30-minute rebuttal. The agent said he requested Meyer’s expertise to confirm from a union leadership position some of the historical concepts he presented during his presentation.

Skubal won the arbitration hearing. He was awarded $32 million rather than the $19 million figure submitted by the Detroit Tigers. One of the highlights of the hearing was when Boras, in arguing for Skubal’s “special achievements,” as provided for in arbitration, told the panel that Skubal was one of only 12 pitchers to win back-to-back Cy Young Awards.

“How rare is that?” Boras said. “That’s the same number of people who have walked on the moon.”

The Most Dangerous Time of Year

Minnesota Twins pitcher Pablo Lopez — Pablo Lopez decided to undergo his second Tommy John surgery. | Jonah Hinebaugh/Naples Daily News/USA Today Network-Florida / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Pablo Lopez of the Twins, Bowden Francis of the Blue Jays and Pierson Ohl of the Rockies recently learned they need elbow surgery. Breakdowns in spring training are so common that clubs brace themselves for bad news.

One of the more fascinating discoveries of the 2024 MLB report on pitching injuries found that spring training is the most dangerous time of year. Pitcher IL placements in spring training had gone up four straight years, including from 60 in 2017 to 111 in 2024.

If you can survive the ramp-up, the news is good: from Day 2 of the regular season to its end those placements had gone down three straight years.

The report offered several theories for the increase in spring breakdowns, including pitchers who hoped offseason rest and rehab might address warning signs from last season (as was the case with Lopez) and higher intensity training in the offseason.

From 2021–24, there have been an average of 5.2 Tommy John surgeries in February and March for major league pitchers. We still have another month to go this year.

This spring Gerrit Cole, Joe Musgrove, Justin Steele, Corbin Burnes and Jackson Jobe are among the many pitchers coming back from 2025 Tommy John surgery. It’s important to remember it’s a long, uncertain way back. Pitchers who underwent the surgery in 2024 and are still trying to regain their form include Josiah Gray, John Means, Cristian Javier, Shane Bieber and Eury Perez.

Breakdown of the Week

Yankees 6'7" prospect Spencer Jones, who came to camp last year with a swing modeled after the one of teammate Aaron Judge, has a new swing this year that’s a carbon copy of another MVP. Check it out here:

Let’s just say Jones likes to aim high.

When Judge (twice) and Jones homered in the same spring game, I wondered if any teammates 6-foot-7 or taller ever had homered in the same game. Nope. Only two teams have had two players that tall homer in the same season, and each case involved a pitcher: Jeff D’Amico and Richie Sexson of the 2000 Brewers and Chris Young and Tony Clark of the 2008 Padres.

Judge’s No-Fly Zone

Judge hit his first two spring home runs off fastballs in the zone in the same game. When will pitchers learn? Challenging Judge with velocity in the zone is asking for trouble. Judge is the greatest slugger of this generation when it comes to damage on heaters in the zone —and it’s not even close. Check out the gap between Judge vs. in-zone heaters and the rest of baseball over the past 18 seasons:

Highest SLG on Fastballs in Zone, 2008–25 (min. 2,000 pitches)	Year	Slugging percentage
Aaron Judge	2025	1.040
Albert Pujols	2008	.926
Mike Trout	2015	.908
Shohei Ohtani	2023	.882
Aaron Judge	2017	.858

The average major league hitter sees 31.1% fastballs in the zone and slugs .473 against them. Judge saw 27% fastballs in the zone last year. Too many. That’s not even in the bottom 20 among players who saw 2,000 pitches and it’s more than he saw in 2017, ’21 and ’23.

Weird Happenings in Texas

The Rangers were a terrible offensive team at home last year. They were last in MLB in home batting average (.225, lowest for the franchise since 1972), home OBP (.297, worst for the franchise since ’68) and home slugging (.363, worst for the Rangers since ’82).

Globe Life Field, which had always played as a hitter’s park, suddenly became a pitcher’s park. Only T-Mobile Park in Seattle was worse for hitters. Rangers GM Chris Young ordered an internal study to investigate why it happened. The study yielded inconclusive results.

“You build your team around slugging and all of a sudden it becomes a pitcher’s park,” Young said. “It was very strange. We did a deep dive into it but could not come up with a reason. And by the end of the season, it started to even out.

“Here’s what’s really weird. Our Triple A team in Round Rock was the worst offensive park in the PCL. And it’s usually one of the most hitter friendly.”

As this chart shows, Globe Life Field played very differently in 2025:

Year	Globe Life Park Factor (Three-Year Rolling Average)	MLB Rank
2025	97	T22
2024	101	9
2023	102	6
2022	100	13

TV on TV This Week

Netherlands vs. Dominican Republic, March 8, Fox

It’s a star-studded matchup, even in the dugout. The managers for this WBC Pool D game, newly minted Hall of Famer Andruw Jones and future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols, hit 1,137 combined home runs in their MLB careers. Among the nine biggest contracts in MLB, four of them belong to players on the Dominican team. Juan Soto, Vlad Guerrero Jr., Manny Machado and Fernando Tatis Jr. are playing under contracts worth a combined $1.955 billion.

The Netherlands will rely on Xander Bogaerts, Ozzie Albies and Jurickson Profar. It may not have the pitching depth to hold down the Dominican firepower, but remember, the Dominicans fizzled in the last WBC. The D.R. did not make it out of pool play. It lost to Venezuela and Puerto Rico, hit only four home runs in four games and posted an ugly 26.3% strikeout rate.