Nobody Wants Their Pitchers to Compete in the World Baseball Classic

MLB wants this event to be like the World Cup of baseball. But imagine a World Cup without Messi or Haaland or Mbappe.

Clayton Kershaw models a shirt I want. (Photo by Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

As you guys know, back in February I was very excited about the World Baseball Classic, which kicks off its first full slate of games today. Now I mostly think the event will simply be a home run derby for the Dominican and American teams—enjoyable, but nothing I’m canceling a dinner reservation at Saffy’s to watch.

The first sign that something was seriously wrong with this year’s World Baseball Classic came three days after I wrote that excited WBC preview, when a frustrated Clayton Kershaw was forced to drop out of the tournament because he couldn’t get insurance to pitch in it.

This is when we learned—or were reminded—that every MLB player needs to be insured to participate, in the event that he gets injured and his team is on the hook for a lot of money. Kershaw is due to earn $20 million this year—his standard one-year rate over his past few seasons with L.A. He says he’s healthy, and his performance in spring training gives us no reason to believe he’s lying. But Kershaw has also missed a decent amount of time over the past several seasons with a back injury that flares up. It’s nothing like the amount of games Jacob deGrom has missed, and I wouldn’t call Kershaw brittle. He’s just at a point where he’ll give you a 2.50 ERA for five months of each season and maybe miss three weeks to a month with a barking back.

Kershaw has always provided more value than the Dodgers pay him. Like Adam Wainwright, he has never become a free agent to see if he could squeeze one more dollar out of some other team. In doing these one-year deals at the end of his career, he has almost certainly left big money on the table. (Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander will each earn $43 million this year, and there’s no way both are more than twice as valuable in a season that Kershaw).

And because he has earned such goodwill with the Dodgers for everything he’s done with the franchise, the club actually supported his wish to pitch in the WBC, even though