The World Baseball Classic exposes everything American baseball is missing

Let's start with a quick comparison. Here's Aaron Judge — almost certainly the most recognizable American baseball player today — hitting a home run to give Team USA the lead on home soil in a crucial World Baseball Classic game against a hated rival in Mexico.

Now, here's Juan Soto doing the same thing for the Dominican Republic against Venezuela — in Miami, not Santo Domingo.

The circumstances were virtually identical — a superstar of the sport delivering an early lead in a critical game — and yet the reactions, and the atmosphere, could hardly have been more different.

And it's not just the D.R. Listen to how loud it got in San Juan, at a stadium with half the capacity of Daikin Park in Houston, when Puerto Rican pitcher Seth Lugo escaped a jam against Columbia:

Or the block party that ensued when Darell Hernaiz walked off Panama. I could keep going, but we'd be here all day. The 2026 WBC has thus far felt like a global celebration, fanatics from all over the world coming together in celebration of this glorious game. That is, everywhere except Houston, where the United States has drawn crowds that feel middling even by MLB postseason standards — if those crowds bother to show up at all.

The numbers back this up. Pool play in San Juan and Tokyo saw crowds of at least 98 percent capacity for every game involving hosts Puerto Rico and Japan. Pool C in Miami didn't have a host country, but the Dominican Republic still cleared 95 percent of capacity against Nicaragua, 98 percent against Venezuela and 88 percent against the Netherlands. Team USA, by contrast, only filled at least 85 percent of Daikin Park in two of their four games — and one of them, against Mexico, sure looked (and sounded) more like a Mexican crowd than an American one.

But you don't need data to confirm what your eyes already tell you, that the American environments are getting lapped by their counterparts. The only question is: Why? Why does the WBC feel like a World Cup for everybody else, while the country that invented the sport and still claims it as its pastime seems to be taking it for granted? The answer is an uncomfortable one, getting at the heart of what baseball culture in America has become.

What American baseball culture is missing compared to the World Baseball Classic

The difference begins at the ground level. In many of these countries, baseball is truly for everyone, a sport that exists in cities and streets and empty lots and is inextricably intertwined with the rhythms of every-day life. In America, by contrast, baseball is an increasingly white and increasingly wealthy and increasingly suburban endeavor, one that requires a four-figure travel-ball budget to play seriously past a certain age.

The result is something far more industrialized, and far less personal. I don't mean this in the individual sense; Judge and his American teammates want to be great and to win, and take the sport as seriously as Soto or anyone else does. But the experience of baseball in the States is fundamentally different, an extension of the youth sports industrial complex more than an expression of national identity or feeling.

There's also, no doubt, a certain innate sense of entitlement going on here. The U.S. assumes it's the best at just about everything, but especially baseball, a sport that remains embedded deep in the psyche even as it's been lapped by football (and, in recent years, basketball). The idea of proving it on the field simply doesn't seem as urgent, because we believe it to be true — and in the event that we lose, well, there are always excuses to make and people to blame rather than admitting we might not measure up.

Which is how you wind up with an American team that, even in a WBC cycle of unprecedented player interest, still feels like it's going through the motions a bit. Not to go full "It Just Means More" here, but, well, it's hard to avoid that sense after watching how invested Dominican fans are in this — and how much fun they're having along the way, how central this is to their sense of self.

We lost that somewhere along the way, lost the sense that this isn't simply a product to be consumed but a part of who we are. Packed crowds at the Tokyo Dome want Japan to win, of course, but they're on their feet cheering almost independent of what's actually happening in the game. Being in the stands is an act of devotion unto itself, a way to connect with something profoundly meaningful. It's hard to imagine that here in the States, where just about every conversation we have about sports is framed through the lens of winning and losing.

I'm not sure what the fix is, but I know that it starts with remembering why exactly this sport became so important to our national mythos in the first place. And it starts with making it easier to play and watch and enjoy it on a daily basis. Maybe then we can remember what this is all for in the first place.