{"id":24309,"date":"2025-05-13T18:23:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T18:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/24309\/"},"modified":"2025-05-13T18:23:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T18:23:09","slug":"pirates-paul-skenes-to-join-team-usa-in-world-baseball-classic-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/24309\/","title":{"rendered":"Pirates&#8217; Paul Skenes to join Team USA in World Baseball Classic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Pittsburgh Pirates star pitcher Paul Skenes will be joining Team USA to compete in the 2026 World Baseball Classic, it was announced Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>The tournament is set to take place in March of 2026, with Team USA competing in Pool B in Houston along with Mexico, Italy, Great Britain and Brazil.<\/p>\n<p>The 2023 No. 1 pick will be 23 years old by the time he takes the mound in the tournament, having posted a brilliant debut campaign where he <a data-i13n=\"cpos:1;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/www.mlb.com\/news\/paul-skenes-nl-rookie-of-the-year-2024\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:won National League Rookie of the Year;cpos:1;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \">won National League Rookie of the Year<\/a>, while also being named one of three finalists for the NL&#8217;s Cy Young Award. Through 54.2 innings pitched this season, Skenes has a 2.63 ERA with six quality starts.<\/p>\n<p>The WBC Championship will be played at loanDepot Park in Miami on March 17, 2026. Team USA will look to redeem itself following a second-place finish in the 2023 WBC, having lost to Team Japan 3-2 in the championship match where Shohei Ohtani walked away with the MVP award while representing his home country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pittsburgh Pirates star pitcher Paul Skenes will be joining Team USA to compete in the 2026 World Baseball&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2402],"tags":[10264,5,139,778,4,877,10,776,64,4297,468,10315,4819,4820],"class_list":{"0":"post-24309","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh-pirates","8":"tag-2026-world-baseball-classic","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-houston","11":"tag-miami","12":"tag-mlb","13":"tag-paul-skenes","14":"tag-pirates","15":"tag-pittsburgh","16":"tag-pittsburgh-pirates","17":"tag-pittsburghpirates","18":"tag-shohei-ohtani","19":"tag-team-japan","20":"tag-team-usa","21":"tag-world-baseball-classic"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/114501924135682353","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}