MIAMI — In the moments after Team USA earned a spot in the championship of the World Baseball Classic, Pete Crow-Armstrong pulled up Instagram and posted a photograph. In the picture, half a dozen members of Team USA are vaulting over the dugout railing as Gunnar Henderson’s game-tying home run took flight in the fourth inning of a 2-1 victory over the Dominican Republic. Bryce Harper appears ready to levitate. Mouths hang agape, lungs burning. To soundtrack the post, Crow-Armstrong chose to make a point. A song by the band Paramore: “Ain’t It Fun.”
“For some reason, everybody thinks that we don’t have fun playing baseball,” Crow-Armstrong said. “I don’t know if we make it look like we don’t have fun, or what. But our goal is to make it to the championship game … That was fun, you know? The moment brings it out of you.”
For the past two weeks as the WBC has unfolded, members of Team USA have talked about this tournament as if unsure how to gauge its importance. Harper lamented that the WBC could not compare to the Olympics. Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal left the team after making one start. Manager Mark DeRosa convinced onlookers that he was unsure of the rules for advancing beyond pool play. And along the way, their celebrations sounded muted compared to the boisterous displays of the other participants.
All it took to turn up the volume was a date with the Dominican Republic.
Facing a star-studded opponent inside a cauldron of noise at loanDepot Park, Team USA responded with its most stirring performance of the tournament. The team has a chance to cap it with a victory in the championship round on Tuesday, where it will face either Italy or Venezuela. But as Sunday evening bled into Monday morning, the players hung around the visitor’s clubhouse at the Miami Marlins ballpark, savoring the victory.
Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes subdued the ferocious Dominican lineup for 4 1/3 innings. Team USA captain Aaron Judge short-circuited a rally by cutting down speedy outfielder Fernando Tatis Jr. at third base. Henderson and fellow youngster Roman Anthony supplied home runs that erased a one-run deficit in the fourth. The relief trio of Tyler Rogers, David Bednar and Mason Miller extricated itself from a variety of jams during the endgame.
One of the few blemishes on a riveting night came at the conclusion. With the tying run at third base, Miller flung a full-count slider to Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Geraldo Perdomo. The pitch cut through the center of the plate but dove several inches below the strike zone. Umpire Cory Blaser decided it was a strike, as he had for a similarly placed pitch to outfielder Juan Soto an inning earlier. Perdomo howled in a protest lost amid the din.
“I don’t want to focus on the last pitch,” Dominican manager Albert Pujols said. “Obviously didn’t go our way. Disappointed about the way that the game ends. But I don’t want to criticize any of that. It just wasn’t meant to be for us.”
The shame of the conclusion was it detracted from all that came before it. In only its second decade of existence, the World Baseball Classic cannot yet surpass the tension and the terror of October baseball. The pitchers operate on stricter limits. Players are torn between representing their countries and being responsible to their employers. Yet at its apex, a level that Sunday’s game approached, the WBC can deliver thrilling baseball and offer insight into the cornucopia of styles spread across the globe.
The crowd of 36,337 favored the Dominican Republic. Although the concourse featured its collection of American partisans — fellows wearing New England Patriots jerseys and others wearing the wigs, waistcoats and breeches worn by the patriots of the Revolutionary War — the “U-S-A” chants were drowned out by Dominican fans’ cowbells and drums. The percussion rattled the roof as D.R. starter Luis Severino struck out Team USA leadoff hitter Bobby Witt Jr. Severino roared and flexed after the strikeout, and did the same after fanning the next batter, Harper.
Witt and Harper looked grim as they returned to the dugout — a continuation of what many outside the Team USA clubhouse have viewed as a dour approach to the WBC. The group has looked “dry as hell,” as longtime big-leaguer Cameron Maybin wrote on X. “I’m talking like somebody just ate a whole pack of saltine crackers in the desert with no water in sight.”
Searching for a common bond, Team USA leaned into military imagery. The players celebrated home runs with salutes. They sported T-shirts that read “Front Toward Enemy,” a saying originally printed as the directions for Claymore mines. When Skenes, who spent two seasons at the Air Force Academy before transferring to LSU, agreed to play for Team USA, he told DeRosa, “I want to do this for every serviceman and woman who protects our freedom.” Before the quarterfinal, DeRosa invited a team-wide address from Robert O’Neill, a former Navy SEAL who has claimed he killed Osama bin Laden during the raid that led to the Al-Qaeda leader’s death in 2011.
“There’s a reason why we’re doing it and a reason why people protect our freedom at night,” DeRosa said before Sunday’s game. “I just wanted to honor that. So that’s why he came in to talk.”
The solemnity of Team USA contrasted with the giddiness projected by the Dominicans. Their energy has been matched by the rapturous crowds packing the ballpark to watch them these past two weeks. Their highlights leap off the screen: Fernando Tatis Jr. slinking down the line after going deep, Juan Soto pounding his chest, Junior Caminero practically leaping out of his cleats. After victories, the team has danced in the clubhouse with 88-year-old Hall of Famer Juan Marichal.
“We all feel together,” Soto said. “We all feel like family.”
That family spent the past two weeks pulverizing pitchers. The Dominicans outscored opponents by 41 runs across their first five games. Their 10-0 quarterfinal rout of Korea ended thanks to the tournament’s mercy rules. The offense mashed 14 home runs during its romp to the semifinal, tying a tournament record set by Team Mexico in 2009. The unit presented a tall task for Skenes, the reigning National League Cy Young award winner. “I don’t think there is a lineup that he has ever faced like this before,” Pujols said.
Those bonds were present in the exuberance displayed by the players. When the budding Tampa Bay Rays star Caminero took Skenes deep in the second inning, Caminero launched his bat across the batter’s box toward his dugout. His teammates had already clambered onto the field to dance as he rounded the bases. An elaborate series of hip-swiveling handshakes followed. Caminero donned a leather jacket offered to each man who hits a homer. He gathered the group to point skyward.
Junior Caminero of Team Dominican Republic is fitted with a jacket after his solo home run off Paul Skenes in the second inning. (Al Bello / Getty Images)
To hear the Americans tell it, those celebrations did not upset them. “That’s why our game is so cool and so much fun to watch,” Harper said. “Because you can see the Dominicans, the way they play, and they love it.”
As a younger man, Harper explained, he tried to demonstrate the same flair. But he was older now, less swaggering. Plus, he maintained, “I can’t dance a lick like Tatis. But I have fun playing this game.”
Crow-Armstrong, a 23-year-old who reported to spring training with a hairdo featuring blue stars painted onto a bleached blonde scalp, suggested Team USA would look inauthentic if it tried to match the energy of teams like the D.R.
“I think you guys would all think it’s silly if we shuffled like Soto, or did Vladdy’s little wiggle,” Crow-Armstrong said. “That’s them. And if I had enough swag to do that, I’d probably do that, too. But I think you guys would think it would be funny if we’re out there doing what they’re doing. And that’s totally OK. We have fun in our way. But we definitely have fun out there.”
For Team USA, the fun on Sunday occurred mostly in the middle innings. After Tatis flunked his test of Judge’s arm in the third, Henderson tied the game with a solo shot off Severino. As the ball took flight, Henderson implored his teammates to join him in the party on the field. Soon after, when Pujols opened up his bullpen, Anthony subjected Gregory Soto to a similar fate. Anthony was less demonstrative. But by then, the group did not need encouragement.
They had weathered all manner of unexpected storms during the early days of this tournament. On Tuesday, they will have the chance to end it in the way they intended.
“We’ve carried ourselves this tournament in the way that we’ve wanted to,” Crow-Armstrong said. “And that is feeling like we’re the best team in this tournament, best team in the world.”