Nobody on this year's championship United States roster has earned All-the-WBC honors (in fact, no player has appeared on more than two Team USA rosters, let alone all of them), but this year's runners up in Puerto Rico have a WBC-co-leading four players on that list. Of those four, Carlos Beltran has had by far the longest career with 20 seasons and counting in the major leagues. Despite the fact that his once premium center field defense has declined to such an extent that he no longer roams the outfield grass with regularity, Beltran was an MLB All-Star in three of the four pre-WBC platform seasons, including last year at age 39. While Beltran may have the length, Yadier Molina has the stability, as his entire career to date has come with the Cardinals. Long known as a defensive wizard, with eight straight Gold Glove awards heading into 2016, Yadi actually served as the backup catcher in his first two WBC's, which makes more sense when you consider the starter was Hall of Famer Ivan Rodriguez.
Of Puerto Rico's two All-the-WBC pitchers, only lefty reliever J.C. Romero has major league experience. In fact, he's got experience all over the majors, as the seven different teams on his resume is the same amount that Beltran has played for, but in six fewer years in the bigs. Romero is such an important part of Team Puerto Rico that he was placed on this year's WBC roster despite his last major league action coming way back in 2012 (the platform year for the last WBC) - although he has stayed fresh since then by playing in AAA, the Mexican League, the Independent Atlantic League, and the Puerto Rican Winter League. Longtime minor league farmhand Orlando Roman (eight years in the New York Mets' system from 1999 thru 2006) also saw his only 2016 action in the PRWL, but prior to last year, the 37-year-old spent four years in Japan, where he made the full-time transition from starter to reliever (despite a brief stint as a closer in the Mexican League). For more about Puerto Rico's 2017 WBC roster, see my post about this year's championship game.
The only other team with four All-the-WBC members is the Netherlands, where the eight-team Dutch Major League provides a forum for prominent Honkbal players as they advance well into their 40s. I'm referring specifically to starting pitcher Rob Cordemans, who has been mowing down batters thru last season, after which he turned 42 years of age. Lefty Diego(mar) Markwell hasn't been quite as consistent across the three WBC platform years we have data for (stats from the DUTM only go back as far as 2007 on baseball-reference.com), and he also didn't start pitching in his native country until after a seven-season stint in the Blue Jays minor league organization (representing his age 16 thru 22 seasons). Tom Stuifbergen (possibly no relation to Nick Stuifbergen, who joined him on the 2006 NED roster) was the only Dutch pitcher on this list who played affiliated ball at the time of a World Baseball Classic tournament, as he started his professional career in the Twins system. And the only Dutch player on this list to see major league action is utilityman Yurendell DeCaster, who came up with the Pirates for three games in 2006, directly following his first WBC appearance. DeCaster (also de Caster) didn't play at all in 2016 (according to bbref.com), but he nevertheless started four games for this year's Dutch club at first base, the fourth position he's played in the WBC.
Five different teams had two players each represent their country in all four WBC's, and I'll go through them in order of major league success enjoyed by the participants. Venezuela boasts two-time AL MVP Miguel Cabrera and single-season saves leader Francisco Rodriguez (you can read more about them in my post about Team Venezuela's 2017 WBC roster). Incidentally, when I made the trek down to Anaheim last week to see the A's play the Angels, I sat in front of a guy who claims to have invented the "K-Rod" nickname for Rodriguez, and to have popularized it by way of a giant sign that read "MLB MEET K-ROD" that he took the ballpark and held up for the cameras during his meteoric rise late in the 2002 season. I haven't been able to verify this through watching archival footage, but it was cool to be tangentially related to such an Angels legend, regardless of what I feel about the team itself.
A pair of lefties have found themselves on all four of Team Mexico's WBC rosters. When first baseman Adrian Gonzalez played in his first WBC he was just 23 years old and one year removed from being ranked as the game's #52 prospect. That was his second season in the majors and his last with the Rangers, for which he made his debut despite spending the majority of his development in the Marlins minor league system. Since then, Gonzalez has been the picture of durability, as he just recently went on the disabled list for the first time in his 14 year career, and honestly that DL placement might have more to do with the hot bat of rookie Cody Bellinger than A-Gon's ailing back. Oliver Perez has made a very interesting transition from high octane starter to serviceable LOOGY reliever, and we can trace that career change in his third WBC platform season. After compiling a middling 4.63 ERA over his first nine seasons as a starter with the Padres, Pirates, Mets, and Nationals AA affiliate, Perez worked out of the bullpen in the Mexican Winter League in 2011 before signing with the Mariners prior 2012, auditioning as a reliever in the minors, and the rest is history.
Team Canada's top All-the-WBC player, Justin Morneau, has the distinction of winning an AL MVP award in the same calendar year as the inaugural World Baseball Classic. Throughout his WBC tenure, CAN has supplemented him in the lineup with such preeminent power hitters as Joey Votto, Freddie Freeman, Jason Bay, and Matt Stairs, but the guy who has played in all four Classics with him is Pete Orr. The middle infielder made his MLB debut in the year leading up to the first WBC, hitting .300 over 150 ABs for the Braves, and was asked back for 2017 at age 37 despite not having played any kind of baseball last year.
When Luke Hughes appeared in the first WBC for Team Australia as the backup second baseman for Trent Durrington, he hadn't yet risen to the AA level. Hughes would then go on to play in more WBC tournaments than he had seasons in the major leagues, as he played most of the 2011 season for the Twins, flanked by two cups of coffee in Minnesota and Oakland. Speaking of the Twins, I feel like it's time for MLB to investigate the pipeline from Australia to Minnesota: each AUS roster in the WBC has featured at least five players that spent a significant portion of their development in the Twins system, topping out with a whopping 11 players this year! One Australian who never saw action with the Twins organization is shortstop Brad Harman, whose major league career consists of six games with the 2008 Phillies. Meanwhile, Harman has spent the last six years playing for his native Melbourne in the Australian Baseball League.
Two players on the South Korean WBC team have played in all four tournaments, but only one has reached the major leagues. Closing pitcher Seung Hwan Oh made the journey to America just last year, after 11 seasons pitching overseas (nine with his native Korea Baseball Organization, two with Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball), and the "Final Boss" picked up right where he left off with a 1.92 ERA and 19 saves finishing games for the Cardinals. Baseball-Reference.com does not show positional data for the KBO, but based on Tae-Kyun Kim's WBC history (and his two seasons in the NPB), we can assume that the slugger is primarily a first baseman. Kim was a member of the starting lineup in only two of his four WBC appearances - in 2006 he sat in favor of major leaguer Hee-Seop Choi and 11-year KBO veteran Seung-Yuop Lee, while in 2013 he was behind S-Y Lee and future major leaguer Dae-Ho Lee - but Kim's .365 batting average at age 34 last year proves that he still has plenty left in the tank, even in the offensively-charged KBO.
No one has played all four years for two-time champion Team Japan (MLB outfielder Nori Aoki, first baseman Seiichi Uchikawa, and starting pitcher Toshiya Sugiuchi have three appearances apiece), but the 2013 champion Dominican Republic has one such player in shortstop Jose Reyes. Reyes actually rode the bench for most of the 2006 tournament in favor of Miguel Tejada (who played in the first three WBC's), but he started and led off in the next two, before returning to a reserve role last year. Going back to '06, one of Reyes's benchmates, second baseman Alfonso Soriano, had a significantly better season than the player who ended up starting most games at the keystone (Placido Polanco, who put up 1,584 fantasy points in 2005, compared to Soriano's 2,445), starting a long tradition of the superior players getting passed over in WBC play - just ask Paul Goldschmidt.
Team Italy has one player with All-the-WBC honors, Cesena native Alessandro "Alex" Maestri. Maestri also has the distinction of playing in a different country in each of his WBC platform seasons: in 2005 he pitched for San Marino in the Italian Baseball League (according to Wikipedia; Baseball-Reference is spotty on ITBL stats before 2007), in 2008 he was in the third of five seasons he would spend in the Cubs minor league system, 2012 was the first of his four seasons with the Japanese Orix Buffaloes, while in 2016 he pitched (rather poorly) for the Korean Hanwha Eagles. Incidentally, in 2017 Maestri would add another country to his resume, as he is currently pitching for Veracruz in the Mexican League.
The only player on the highly successful Team Cuba to play in all four WBC's is slugging left fielder Frederich Cepeda, who has amassed a 1.020 OPS over 20 seasons in Cuba's Serie Nacional. Notably, infielder Yulieski Gurriel (nee Gourriel) played in the first three tournaments before defecting to the USA and signing with the Astros, and both outfielder Alfredo Despaigne and pitcher Vladimir Garcia have played in the last three WBC's. It would be interesting to see which Cuban WBC players who have reached the major leagues (such as Aroldis Chapman, Yoenis Cespedes, Jose Abreu, Raisel Iglesias, Yasmany Tomas, Leonys Martin, and Guillermo Heredia) would have been willing to return and play for their native country had the immigration situation been different.
And finally, there is one player for team China who has played in All-the-WBC's, but given the lack of information on the China Baseball League, I could find very little statistical information about Kun Chen outside of his international competitions. For instance, in the 2008 Olympics, he blew a save against Taiwan and was ejected from China's game with the United States for throwing at a batter in retaliation for a home plate collision, but I couldn't find any regular season stats for his time playing with the Sichuan Dragons.
So by my count, that's 22 players who have played in all four World Baseball Classics, and given the age of each and the four year gap between each tournament, we're very unlikely to see anywhere close to that number continue this trend into 2021. Until then, let's hope that the climate for international baseball competition remains fresh and exciting, and that countries from all over the world send their best players in the hopes of unseating the defending champion Team USA!
No comments:
Post a Comment