{"id":603426,"date":"2026-03-03T11:11:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T11:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/603426\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T11:11:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T11:11:21","slug":"the-japanese-talent-to-watch-out-for-during-the-2026-wbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/603426\/","title":{"rendered":"The Japanese talent to watch out for during the 2026 WBC"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The 2026 World Baseball Classic is right around the corner. In addition to crowning the world\u2019s best baseball team, the tournament often serves as a showcase for players from outside MLB to put themselves on the radar of fans outside their home nations.<\/p>\n<p>For many fans, the WBC was the first glimpse of Japanese players Roki Sasaki, Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto, Kenta Maeda and a long list of other stars.<\/p>\n<p>While Samurai Japan features more MLB-affiliated players than ever for this edition of the WBC, there are still NPB stars fans should keep an eye on for the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2026 World Baseball Classic is right around the corner. In addition to crowning the world\u2019s best baseball&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603427,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2302],"tags":[78487,5,6593,71236,2353,2352,71237,14676,20628,3434,4820],"class_list":["post-603426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-npb","tag-atsuki-taneichi","tag-baseball","tag-hiromi-ito","tag-hiroya-miyagi","tag-nippon-professional-baseball","tag-npb","tag-ryuhei-sotani","tag-shota-morishita","tag-shugo-maki","tag-teruaki-sato","tag-world-baseball-classic"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116164944423958385","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603426","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=603426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}