World Baseball Classic announces details for qualifiers

The next World Baseball Classic will be held in 2021. We don’t know details of sites or dates for that yet, but the qualifying rounds to add four teams to the 16 who have already qualified for next year’s tournament will be held at Kino Stadium in Tucson, Arizona from March 10-26.

Here are the two pools for the Tucson qualifiers:

Each qualifying pool will feature a nine-game double elimination round with the top two teams from each pool advancing to the World Baseball Classic next year. The four advancing teams will join the 16 countries – Australia, Canada, China, Chinese Taipei, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Kingdom of the Netherlands, Mexico, Puerto Rico, United States and Venezuela – that received automatic invitations based on their performance in the 2017 tournament.

I’ve always enjoyed the WBC. Tournament games are fun and players seem to really like representing their countries. I’m sure you remember this no-look tag by Javier Baez in the 2017 tournament:

And this fantastic catch by Adam Jones later the same spring:

We’ll keep you posted here at BCB with the results of these qualifiers, and also post when the dates and venues for the 2021 WBC are announced.