The WBC kicks off this week, and players have already left their respective Spring Training camps to join their countrymen (or ancestral countrymen, at least). After they play some exhibition warm-up games against professional teams, both MLB and otherwise, on Tuesday, they\u2019ll kick off official tournament play with Chinese Taipei at Australia in the Tokyo Dome at 9 PM Central Wednesday evening.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s time to start choosing our rooting interests. There are all kinds of reasons to pick any of the different teams. There are players from Royals camp on 11 of the 20 teams. The United States is the most represented with three different Royals – Bobby Witt Jr., Michael Wacha, and Matt Strahm – but multiple teams have two Royals, including Venezuela and Italy.<\/p>\n
You could, of course, pull an Olympics and root for the team that comes from the country you live in. For most of us, that would also be Team USA. Or you can choose the team of your heritage, much like many of the ballplayers.<\/p>\n
Personally, I\u2019ll be rooting for Italy. Not only does it count two of my favorite players among its starters in Jac Cagliaone and Vinnie Pasquantino, but that\u2019s also where my own heritage is from. Greco means Greek in Italian, after all – that\u2019s why the wrestling style traced back to Ancient Greece is called Greco-Roman wrestling.<\/p>\n
But who is everyone else rooting for? Are we going to start some new intra-site rivalries over this? Is anyone attending any watch parties? Wonder of wonders, it appears every game is going to be televised, mostly on the FSNs, but some on Fox and others on Tubi. Regardless, we are truly blessed to be able to watch competitive baseball so early in the year this year! Here\u2019s to another great WBC competition!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The WBC kicks off this week, and players have already left their respective Spring Training camps to join…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2387],"tags":[5,936,2123,55,77247,2596,2595,4,252,72937],"class_list":{"0":"post-603306","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-kansas-city-royals","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-kansas","10":"tag-kansas-city","11":"tag-kansas-city-royals","12":"tag-kansas-city-royals-discussion","13":"tag-kansascity","14":"tag-kansascityroyals","15":"tag-mlb","16":"tag-royals","17":"tag-royals-review-question-of-the-day"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116164507869305098","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603306","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=603306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}