Despite Hurdles, World Baseball Classic Builds Success

SEE ALSO: World Baseball Classic Archive

As an event, the World Baseball Classic has unquestionably been a worldwide success . . . in spite of being a relative failure in its biggest market.

From a broad perspective, the event immediately became the greatest international baseball tournament of all time. It has helped spread baseball around the world. Although it’s impossible to fully apportion how much credit the WBC should get for the spread of Major League Baseball internationally, there are merchandise sales, television contracts and even new baseball stadiums to prove its worldwide impact. It also helped get baseball back in the Olympics.

The event has drawn outstanding TV ratings in places as varied as South Korea and the Dominican Republic. It has proven that baseball has much more parity than suspected. In its first three iterations, eight different countries have made the semifinals.

And it has made money. The WBC has been profitable since the first tournament in 2006. It has also doled out money to baseball federations around the world. As a brand-building event around the globe, the WBC has been a winner. It’s not entirely coincidental that Korea, a semifinalist in 2006 and finalist in 2009, now has more players playing in Major League Baseball.

“The WBC from the first time was a tremendous success,” said Paul Archey, the former MLB senior vice president of international baseball operations. “(That’s) how it was pitched to owners. We didn’t create this event for the United States. It wasn’t for baseball to be more popular here. It was to give baseball a global platform. The No. 1 objective was to raise the profile of baseball around the world.”

If the goal was for the Classic to make an impact in the U.S., the event has been a failure. Television ratings in the U.S. barely make a blip. A U.S. audience hoping to see Clayton Kershaw and Mike Trout hasn’t gravitated to seeing the Christian Yelich and Drew Smyly compete for the title.

Teams aren’t thrilled about watching their players leave spring training for up to three weeks. Some players aren’t thrilled either.

So, as the fourth World Baseball Classic gets set to begin, the duality of the tournament is apparent. The Classic has highlighted MLB’s stars of tomorrow like Yu Darvish, Aroldis Chapman and Yoenis Cespedes long before they became big league stars. It has proven that baseball is not a sport mastered by just a few countries. And while it may not rival world cups in sports like soccer, basketball or even rugby and cricket, it is one of the larger international tournaments around.

“This year’s tournament will be one of the biggest international sports events in 2017 in terms of attendance, broadcast/online viewership and social media engagement,” World Baseball Softball Confederation president Riccardo Fraccari said.

Domestically, the Classic will probably never be a classic until Team USA does something. And so far, Team USA has woefully disappointed. The U.S. holds an even 10-10 record all time in WBC play. In the annals of WBC success, the U.S. equals the Netherlands with a best finish of fourth place. The U.S. has not just looked up to Japan in the WBC. It is looking up at Japan, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, South Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

Until Team USA makes a run to the finals and plays with an urgency lacking in its first three trips, it’s hard for the event to break through in its biggest market.

“If there is an increased level of interest by American fans, it will grow economically,” said MLB Players Association chief of business affairs Tim Slavin, who serves on the board of directors for the World Baseball Classic.

If the U.S. exits in the second round of play again, as it did in 2013 and 2009, it will likely lead to modest TV ratings again in the States. If the U.S. can make a run to the finals for the first time in WBC history, it could give the Classic its first breakthrough among the average U.S. sports fan . . . or it could prove that the WBC just can’t compete with March Madness.

“Obviously American fans want to see the American team do well,” said Chris Park, MLB’s senior vice president of growth, strategy and international and the league’s point person on the World Baseball Classic. “I think in the context of the highest level World Cup tournaments, enduring success requires both sustained excellence of the highest profile programs and the emerging success of frontier programs. We don’t view it as an either-or tradeoff. In light of the depth of the field, we believe we’re poised to see that.”

Even if TV ratings in the U.S. remain modest, the World Baseball Classic is meeting its actual goals, the ones that matter for the decision makers who crafted the tournament.

When the World Baseball Classic was conceived, Archey cautioned that what would determine the success of the Classic would be more ephemeral than just television ratings and tickets sold.

As he pitched the event to the owners, he laid out three objectives. The WBC would create a platform for international baseball growth, providing for the first time an opportunity for the best players in the world to play for their country in an international event. It would help grow the game at the grassroots level in some of the more fledgling baseball markets around the world. And it would create significant revenue streams for MLB.

The MLBPA, joint partners in developing and organizing the tournaments, viewed it the same way, with the union’s chief operating officer at the time, Gene Orza, seeing the WBC as a way to make baseball bigger around the world.

By those measures, the World Baseball Classic has been a success. The WBC is expected to bring in around $100 million in revenue this time. It has generated a profit since its first event in 2006. And that profit comes after the event doles out seven-figure payouts to national federations and players around the world.

Those payouts can be game-changers for national federations in less-developed baseball markets. As one national federation official described it, the payouts for just making the tournament are useful to a federation’s budget, but the payout for advancing to the second round can be game-changing for less baseball-rich nations. And when a team like the Netherlands makes it to the semifinals, it can make a significant impact. It helped fund a new $15 million stadium project (Sportpark Pioniers in Hoofddorp) that is designed to exacting MLB standards (and is expandable to up to 30,000 seats), opening up the possibility of an eventual MLB trip to Europe.

The addition of the qualifying rounds has helped broaden the WBC’s reach, as the qualifiers have given MLB a chance to host WBC qualifier games in Europe and Australia and it has expanded the WBC field to 28 teams.

That long-term, worldwide approach is why the Classic appears safe on the schedule for years to come. Commissioner Rob Manfred has said the WBC will remain around as long as he is commissioner, although he held short of promising it will remain in its current form.

SEE ALSO: World Baseball Classic Archive

“I am always open to the idea–whether it’s timing, structure–that we could make the WBC or anything else better, but the idea that this will be the last WBC is not one I’d be supportive of,” Manfred said.

Timing is the biggest hurdle the WBC will always face. There is no ideal time to hold the tournament. The current format begins too soon for North American players (March 6) and still manages to finish too late (March 22), giving players on the roster bubble an incentive to forgo the tournament.

But there is no other perfect time either. Playing the tournament in early November after the season ends will force many players to try to pick back up after a month-long layoff. Playing the tournament in-season requires juggling the schedules of Major League Baseball as well as the Asian professional leagues.

If there was going to be a tweak to the tournament format, it would most likely be to break the now three-week long tournament into smaller, bite-sized pieces. It’s possible the first round could be played over a week at the end of the season. The second round could then be another week during spring training while the semifinals and finals (or a three-game finals series) could be squeezed in around the all-star break.

But those are tweaks. Barring something completely unexpected, the WBC appears to be set to return for years to come. If there is something that could actually kill the World Baseball Classic, it’s the cost of insurance.

Every time the Classic arrives, plenty of attention gets focused on the players who aren’t playing. The reality is even if the WBC got all of the top players in the game to agree to play, it wouldn’t be able to afford to put all of them on the field.

To ensure that teams aren’t left high and dry, the WBC takes out insurance policies for any major leaguer who plays in the tournament. The player gets his guaranteed salary from the team while the team gets reimbursed for the time he misses.

With position players, the cost of those policies is rarely prohibitive. The number of position players who have suffered career-ending injuries on the field is extremely small, making the risk profile reasonable for insurance companies and resulting in modest premiums for the WBC.

But pitching is inherently riskier. A Tommy John surgery could lead to the insurance policy paying a club two years or more of a player’s salary. Depending on the pitcher, that could be a $60 million payout. And that’s not even allowing for a worst-case scenario where a pitcher in a long-term deal suffers a career-ending shoulder injury.

And insurers won’t always insure everyone. Insurers might balk at ensuring the elbow of a pitcher who has been diagnosed with an elbow strain in the past few years. If the Classic can’t find an insurer willing to cover a player completely, an MLB player can’t play.

Israel outfielder Sam Fuld found that if he signed with a team this spring, he wouldn’t be able to play in the Classic. Insurance wouldn’t cover his shoulder after he missed all of last season with an injury that required surgery. So, Fuld opted to not sign with a team until after the WBC, as it was the only way he could play in the tournament—no contract, no need for insurance.

The WBC has gotten creative to try to keep the insurance costs down. The pitch limits of the tournament help reassure the insurers that no pitcher will be taxed. The WBC’s organizers have collected reams of data to show that players who play in the WBC are not more likely to be injured than those who opt to pass on the tournament.

But with insurance already the biggest expense of the tournament, an amount that numbers in the tens of millions of dollars, it is possible that at some point in the future, the insurance costs could become prohibitive.

So far that hasn’t happened. And whether the U.S. makes a run deep through the tournament or this year’s WBC becomes another showcase for the passion of baseball in Latin America, Asia and even Europe, it will continue to be the best assemblage of international baseball talent the game has ever seen.

“Unquestionably, this is the best baseball tournament in the world,” Park said.