MIAMI — Heartbreak fresh, emotional wound still gaping, epic home run for naught, Bryce Harper traipsed across the field at LoanDepot Park and into the middle of a celebration. Venezuela had just won the World Baseball Classic, the greatest victory in the country’s rich baseball history, and Harper wanted to pay homage. The game demanded he do so.
Harper loves baseball for its manifold beauties, the most important being that it is the world’s to relish. And he wanted every Venezuelan player, the ones who couldn’t stop their tear ducts from overflowing and those who still couldn’t believe they’d actually won the WBC, to know that if the price of their joy was his pain, he was nonetheless thrilled for what they were getting to experience.
“It’s America’s pastime, but that’s the greatest thing about our game,” Harper told ESPN. “We can share it with all these different countries as well and bring it all together and be part of this. And it’s awesome. It’s really awesome.”
What unfolded Tuesday night was indeed awesome, the culmination of a tournament that over two weeks injected the game with extreme doses of culture and pride and love. Stripped of all those things, Venezuela’s 3-2 win against Team USA would have been simply a damn good baseball game, clean and tight and expertly pitched and charming in its own right. Imbued with them, the finals served as a reminder that the original premise of the WBC — for all of its charms, baseball that pits the unique styles of baseball-playing countries against one another is particularly compelling — was not just spot-on but makes the sport better by its mere existence.
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If any American can speak to the power of playing for one’s country and the benefits it offers, it’s Harper. It is how he was able to see the world for the first time. At 16, he played for the 16U U.S. national team in Veracruz, Mexico. A year later with the 18U team, he traveled to Barquisimeto, Venezuela — one of the cradles of talent for a country introduced to the game in the late 19th century by expatriates from Cuba, a country that learned the sport from Americans in the 1860s. He saw that others adored baseball same as he did, even if they spoke different languages and lived different lives and played a different style than he’d been taught. He didn’t just learn from the games. He learned from the people who played them.
Never was that more obvious than at 10:24 p.m. ET on Tuesday, when Harper, facing Andres Machado, a Venezuelan veteran who plays professionally in Japan, left a 93 mph changeup over the heart of the plate. Harper uncoiled his swing and sent the ball into orbit to straightaway center field, the sort of contact he has made enough times to understand the ball would breach the outfield fence with plenty of room to spare. Before it landed to take what had been a 2-0 deficit and turn it into a 2-2 tie, Harper’s bat tomahawked through the air, flipped in a moment of unbridled joy and meaning.
It was the sort of thing that used to be a no-no in Major League Baseball, a league long guided by an archaic set of unwritten rules that outlawed anything seen as disrespectful. It was always a fallacy, this notion of baseball as a gentleman’s sport with set guidelines, as if organic evolution should be ignored. Slowly but surely, the WBC helped spread so much of baseball’s modern flavor, eventually allowing this son of a Las Vegas ironworker to do something long reserved for his friends in Latin America.
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Bat flips existed before the WBC, certainly, but they weren’t woven into the game’s fabric like they are now. And for that, America owes the world a debt of gratitude. Genuine, impromptu displays of overwhelming emotion are universal feelings, and if society mirrors sports, their place in baseball was an inevitability. Harper’s flip followed Wilyer Abreu’s, which came after Fernando Tatis Jr.’s, which chased countless others before it, all helping normalize in-game celebrations.
“I’m just glad that I gave us the opportunity and gave us the moment, right?” Harper said. “I mean, that’s what you live for.”
As Harper rounded third, he saluted his teammates who had emptied the dugout and awaited him at home plate. Even Team USA, which had treated this WBC with a businesslike, no-nonsense attitude, couldn’t help but pour out together to greet him. Instinct took over. Harper pointed to the American flag on his jersey’s left sleeve.
His glorious moment lost some of its resonance a half-inning later when Eugenio Suarez doubled in the eventual game-winning run in the top of the ninth, and the United States’ disappointment lingered hours after the final out, recorded by flamethrowing closer Daniel Palencia, the Chicago Cubs reliever who didn’t sign a professional contract until he was 20. Harper was in his second major league season by that age. It illustrates how disparate the paths to baseball glory can be, a lesson that Harper doesn’t take for granted, not in his 30s and in the latter half of his career.
Harper made sure to bring his family to this WBC. He wanted them to experience the tournament the same as he was for the first time; he had declined to participate in past WBCs. Even if his children were too young to understand much of anything, they would see him wearing USA across his chest, hear the Venezuelan fans who overwhelmed the stadium for the championship chanting “Ponche!” — Spanish for strikeout — every time a Team USA hitter faced a two-strike count. The vitality, the energy, the magnitude of it all — it’s contagious, and it’s not to be hoarded. Everyone deserves to feel it. “The thing about having my family with me,” Harper said, “is I want them to share these moments with me.”
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Harper wanted them there even if he was 4-for-24 in the first six games of the tournament. Even if Aaron Judge went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in the finale and the United States mustered only three hits and its closer, Mason Miller, couldn’t pitch in the top of the ninth inning of a tie game because his major league team, the San Diego Padres, did not want him to. All of that is true, and it still didn’t ruin Harper’s day, because he had just participated in a whale of a game, and, he said, “it showed us that the best team in the world won.”
That team is Venezuela, and their players are the beneficiary of the United States’ munificence in spreading baseball beyond its borders. They took the raw materials of the game, made it their own, spent decades honing it and are now champions for it.
“Baseball’s in a really good spot, in a really good situation,” Harper said. “And there’s a lot of young talent in all countries. And I think the world saw baseball’s a great game. It’s a lot of fun to watch the cultures from every other country and ours as well. It’s one of the best sports in the world, and to be able to bring people together and teams together and players together to do that these last two weeks has been a blast.”
The pleasure was all ours as fans of the sport. We’re the lucky ones, getting to live in a time when a baseball team can wear the colors of its homeland and win gold medals for it. The Venezuelans, after failing to even reach the finals in the previous five WBCs, cherished theirs and will return to a country too often defined by its problems with memories that will never dim.
Anyone who forgets this WBC just wasn’t paying attention. The spirited run to the semifinals by an Italy team made up almost entirely of Italian-Americans who adopted their heritage. The effortless cool of a Dominican Republic roster that delivers new influences to the game on the regular. The precision of Japan, and the raw talent of Team USA, and the newest Venezuelan heroes, whose future is in flux after years of political instability. If anyone had something to play for, it was them.
All of which leaves the WBC in an enviable spot. This thing is real. It’s really real. And it’s because baseball chose to leave its past where it belongs and lean into the gift that is international baseball. They brought it all together, just as Harper said, and made magic.
