Joon Lee: Shohei Ohtani striking out Mike Trout ‘almost single-handedly’ elevated World Baseball Classic

The World Baseball Classic has a moment that changed everything, and Joon Lee can tell you exactly when it happened.

It was March 21, 2023, bottom of the ninth, Japan leading the United States 3-2 in the final, and Shohei Ohtani — who had spent the previous five innings pitching for his country, and was in the middle of rewriting what it meant to be a baseball player — walked back to the mound to close it out himself. The last batter he faced was Mike Trout, his Angels teammate, who was still one of the two or three best players alive, and Ohtani got him on a full-count slider to end it. Lee calls it the most important baseball moment of the last 20 years, and it is genuinely difficult to argue with him.

Lee, the former ESPN MLB writer who launched his own YouTube channel last year after being laid off by the network in 2023, joined Brendon Kleen on Awful Announcing’s The Play by Play podcast this week as the tournament heads into its single-elimination round.

Lee argues that the WBC didn’t become a national sports story gradually, it became one in a single at-bat, and every controversy and viral moment and argument about American patriotism that has defined this tournament’s growing cultural footprint flows from the specific fact that Shohei Ohtani, the most talented baseball player alive, decided that this tournament was worth crying over, worth pitching through exhaustion for, worth treating like the most important thing he does in a given year.

“That moment at the end of the last WBC with Trout and Ohtani — and Ohtani being the Babe Ruth of this century and him caring as much as he does about this tournament — I think has almost single-handedly uplifted the prestige of the tournament,” Lee said. “Because if a guy who has won now two World Series titles is crying listening to the Japanese national anthem in the first round of the WBC, it means something to people.”

The WBC is 20 years old, and Lee reached for the World Cup as a reference point, a tournament that took roughly 40 years to become the kind of global event where nearly a billion people are watching at any given moment, where the thing stops being a sporting competition and becomes something closer to a shared planetary experience. He argues that the WBC is somewhere in the middle of that same journey right now, past its awkward early years but not yet fully arrived, with an entire generation of players who have grown up watching it, particularly in Asia, where Japan and Korea have treated it as a matter of genuine national importance since the beginning. The combination of that generational investment and Ohtani’s specific gravitational pull has brought the tournament to a place it couldn’t have reached on its own.

What’s happening around Team USA this year is, in a strange way, evidence of exactly that. Bryce Harper said the WBC “is not the Olympics” and drew immediate backlash from people who found the framing insulting, because every other country in this tournament has been behaving as if it absolutely is. Tarik Skubal pulled out mid-tournament with a planned exit, and people questioned his commitment to the country. The Mark DeRosa situation became a national conversation overnight. The fact that any of this registers as a controversy — that anyone is exercised enough to have the argument — is genuinely new for a tournament that barely existed in the American sports consciousness as recently as 2017.

Lee tied all of it to a longer piece he’s been reporting on the global expansion plans of MLB, the NBA, and the NFL, and the role of private equity in accelerating that push. Lee said he was at a sports diplomacy conference in Washington a few weeks ago where the phrase “the American decade of sports” was being used in complete seriousness, almost as if it was a coordinated effort, on both the political and financial level, to leverage the coming run of American-hosted mega-events into lasting cultural influence abroad, with sports serving as the export that replaces what Hollywood represented for the previous half-century.

The WBC doesn’t need any of that to justify itself. It got here on its own.