The World Baseball Classic is Awesome Because ____________

Nelly Cruz, the King of Dominican Baseball.

At the 2023 World Baseball Classic, cameras caught Nelson Cruz, now the GM of Team Dominican, saying to his teammates in the dugout during a game, “I would pay to play in this tournament.”

It was a nice sound bite, but let’s break it down. Nelly made $134M in his playing career. If at any point they stopped paying him, he would stop playing (it’s happened before and may happen again, unfortunately– we will see). In 2007, in the Israel Baseball League, we had a strike. They were late paying us by a few days, and our Dominican teammates said, “If they no pay, we no play,” and we said, “If you’re not playing, we aren’t either.” So one hot July afternoon at Kfar Hayaroke in Ramat Hasharon on a basketball court scattered with half-dressed, tired, unpaid baseball players, the shortest and least economically impactful work stoppage (we were being paid $2,000/month, not $134,000,000) in baseball history occurred. It was resolved in time for us to quickly get dressed and board the buses for the day’s games. But it was the principal. They no pay. We no play.

Except at the WBC.

For those of us lucky enough to work in baseball, to turn a childhood fantasy into a career, at some point, the fantasy disappears and what is left is just work. The more I elevate in baseball, the less it has to do with baseball. Some days, I could be selling paper. What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the business of sports kind of ruins the magic of sports, for the people conducting the business, at least. Except every once and a while, the business disappears and the magic returns. And that is why the World Baseball Classic matters. Players who would, quite literally, stop playing if they weren’t being paid obscene amounts of money, would pay to play. Everything gets flipped upside down.

The World Baseball Classic is awesome because for two weeks, the business of baseball disappears, and the magic of baseball returns. And you can feel it. The players can feel it. The fans can feel it. They are kids again, playing with friends in the backyard, dreaming about playing in front of 40,000 people, except it’s real, there are 40,000 actual people in the stands and millions more watching on TV. The obvious reason for this is that players are not playing for themselves, but for their nations. They are happy to let go of thinking about their contracts temporarily and return to the days when they would squeeze into vans on the way to tournaments and eat McDonald’s on the way home and do it all again the next day.

Nelly Cruz, the “Boomstick” himself, King of Dominican Baseball, said it best when he said he would pay to play in the WBC. I know I would.

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Visit Israel Baseball’s website for info.