Team USA goes down in flames

Every three years for the past 20 years, baseball fans all over the world are treated to the World Baseball Classic, a rough approximation of the format and tournament nature of FIFA’s World Cup. It’s a celebration of a truly beautiful, romantic, and joyous sport — unless you happen to play for Team USA, that is. The tournament wrapped up on Tuesday, where Team USA had managed to secure a spot in the final (for the second straight tournament) after slowly becoming villains over the course of the WBC’s two weeks. (And that isn’t even getting into the Iran War we just started for shits and giggles!)

While teams from all over the globe displayed true passion, elation, heartbreak and the gamut of human emotion, Team USA instead elected to gratuitously engage in performative (and often earnest) redassery. Cal Raleigh refused to shake the hand of his Mariners teammate who was playing for another country and approached him at the plate with an open hand and a smile. Many of the players expressed (often unprompted!) an undying love for the American military, uncomfortably praising old 9/11 anthems that helped serve for propaganda in the first Iraq War. They invited a member of Seal Team Six (who once told young male Kamala Harris voters that in a just world they would be his “concubines”) to give the team a pep talk before the semifinals.

While every other team was filled with individuals playing with laughter, screams of elation, and tears of every emotion while draped in their country’s flags, Team USA elected to play with scowls and straight faces, some acting like they’d rather be anywhere else and others acting like emotion as a form of patriotism was taboo at best and worthy of punishment at worst.

Oh, and that final? It pitted Team USA against Venezuela, a country that was bombed and whose leader was abducted extrajudiciously by the United States just a couple of months ago. Eugenio Suarez, who ended up driving in the winning run for Venezuela and who just signed a new deal with the Reds after playing in MLB for the past several years, is one of the Venezuelans who has had their protected status threatened since the US invasion of their country. Suarez’s naturalization interview was canceled. He has relatives at risk of deportation (or worse).

The end of the tournament was held in Miami, where fans of the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico and a host of other Latin American countries packed the Marlins’ stadium and were loud as hell every night. By the final, Team USA was lustily and heartily booed by the majority, and for myriad justified reasons. Mercifully, Team USA lost (for the second tournament in a row), and true to form, acted like petulant children in response, removing their silver medals in disgust immediately having them placed around their necks.

The United States has long been a villain to the rest of the world, and perhaps for even longer has been a villain to entire swaths of its own populace. I have no doubt that for most players on Team USA, they very much still consider themselves to be the heroes — to be the good guys, who “play the game the right way.” But I love that for one evening — if nothing else — they got a glimpse of what the rest of the world really thinks of them. And that their opponents played with joy in their hearts and with emotion pouring out of them, and screamed their national anthem at the top of their lungs.

It’s time to sunset the joyless, coplike nature of American baseball forever. The sport belongs to the world now, and everyone else is having a whole lot more fun.