Connor Mount, Correspondent
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — Now playing in its fourth World Baseball Classic, Team USA has quickly established a tradition of bringing its B-list pitching staff to the international stage while the nation’s best arms choose to stay in spring training.
While the U.S. staff — led by Chris Archer, Marcus Stroman, Danny Duffy and Drew Smyly — is as good as any in the tournament, it’s hard not to notice who is missing from the roster.
Ace pitchers like Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer and David Price have never represented Team USA. Current top dogs like Corey Kluber, Chris Sale and Noah Syndergaard all took a pass on joining this year’s team.
Syndergaard, the Mets’ budding superstar, told reporters he had “not one bit” of regret for skipping the WBC, because he’s “a Met,” and “ain’t nobody made it to the Hall of Fame or win a World Series playing in the WBC.”
WBC pitchers risk injury throwing in high-intensity games while their colleagues get loose in spring training, which could cost them millions of dollars in the long term.
But what about the short term? Does participation in the World Baseball Classic hurt pitchers’ Major League performance the following season?
It’s unclear.
Capital News Service collected a data set of all MLB pitchers who played the year before and the year after the three prior WBCs (2006, 2009, 2013).
The data set was broken into two groups — starting pitchers who played in the WBC and those who didn’t — and was compared in terms of how their performance changed between the MLB seasons surrounding the tournament, from 2005 to 2006; from 2009 to 2010; or from 2012 to 2013.
In the season after the World Baseball Classic, the 44 pitchers who played in the tournament averaged 2.5 fewer starts and 17 fewer innings than the year before. And the average pitcher’s WAR (which measures how many wins a player accounts for above a replacement-level player) fell by half a win (2.96 to 2.47) between seasons, a decline of 16.5 percent.
In this test, it was found that pitchers who skipped the tournament experienced less of a drop. They averaged 0.7 fewer starts in the season after the WBC, and 3.2 fewer innings. Their WAR declined a tenth of a win between seasons (1.78 to 1.7), a drop of 4.9 percent.
While that seems to suggest there’s a connection between playing in the WBC and a larger decline in performance, that’s not the case: No statistically significant difference between the two groups’ performances was found.
For statistics nerds, the test of statistical significance discovered a (huge) p-value of .88. To accept that there was a real association between pitching in the World Baseball Classic and a decline in performance, that number would have to have been .05 or lower.
So the next time you hear concerned fans complain that their team’s ace is going to hurt himself in the World Baseball Classic, remind them that there’s no convincing evidence to be worried about.
