Adam Amin has been in rooms like this before. Game 5 of the ALDS last October, 15 innings, nearly five hours, the longest deciding game in baseball history, and he never ran out of gas. He’s called Mets-Phillies NLDS games where both fan bases came out of it convinced he was rooting against their team. He knows what it feels like when a baseball crowd turns a stadium into something alive, when every pitch carries a weight that a Tuesday night in June simply cannot replicate.

“When the crowd is great — and this is why playoff baseball is one of the greatest things I’ve ever been fortunate enough to call — you do see how every pitch gets magnified,” Amin said during a recent appearance on Stugotz and Company.

The World Baseball Classic, he thinks, gets there. Not always. Not in the early going. But it gets there.

“You may not feel it in the second inning of USA-Brazil,” Amin added. “But you’ll feel it come quarterfinal time. You’ll get it in the knockout stages of this tournament.”

Fox secured the WBC television rights last October, with all 47 games split across Fox, FS1, FS2, Tubi, and the Fox Sports app. The tournament runs from March 4 through March 17, with pool play spread across San Juan, Houston, Tokyo, and Miami. Amin will work alongside Adam Wainwright and A.J. Pierzynski — the same crew that spent the 2024 NLDS defending itself against accusations of bias from Mets and Phillies fans simultaneously, which Pierzynski took as a compliment.

What sets the WBC apart from Amin’s usual postseason work isn’t just the atmosphere. It’s the homework. He’s been studying the histories of countries and their relationships to baseball, the kind of context that doesn’t come up in a Tigers-Mariners series but suddenly matters when Brazil takes the field. He’s learned about the Japanese diaspora in São Paulo, why the Brazilian roster features players born in Brazil who became Japanese citizens — including manager Uichi Matsumoto, who was born in São Paulo but took the name Uichi specifically to avoid the foreign player limits that NPB teams carry on their rosters. He’s gone back to the 1860s, where a British-born manager ran the Cincinnati Red Stockings, giving Great Britain a footnote in baseball’s origins that almost nobody knows.

“I got to be a little bit on my toes,” he said, “ready to answer some question or at least have a working knowledge of the backgrounds of these countries and their connection to baseball.”

The crew’s curiosity is part of it, too. Wainwright and Pierzynski are going to ask questions, Amin said, and he wants to be ready for wherever the conversation goes. That’s always been his strength. He’s worked with more than 150 different analysts over the course of his career and has a knack for making any pairing sound like it’s been together for years — whether it’s Pierzynski going off-script or Stacey King doing whatever Stacey King does on a Bulls broadcast.

Part of being ready is understanding what makes the WBC feel different from a regular broadcast in the first place. Playoff football, he said, doesn’t feel like a different sport. The energy is the same, the rhythm is the same, you just notice coaches being slightly more aggressive because the margin for error is gone. Baseball is different. A June 12 game and an Oct. 12 game are played under the same rules and on the same field, but they don’t feel anything alike. The crowd turns every pitch into an event. The at-bat becomes its own narrative arc. He’s felt that in Seattle, in New York, in Philadelphia. The WBC, at its best, gets to that place.

“The crowd is another element, another tool that you should use to make your broadcast better,” he said. “I’ve always said that, especially doing TV.”

At the end of it, he said, the job is the same as it’s always been. Document what’s in front of you, ride the emotion, put it in context, and have some fun. He’s been doing that since he was 24 years old at ESPN, the youngest broadcaster to call a New Year’s Day Big Six game, working his way up to a stage that keeps getting bigger. The WBC is just the next room he’s walking into.

He’ll be ready when it gets loud.