{"id":515485,"date":"2026-03-03T07:14:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T07:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/515485\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T07:14:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T07:14:11","slug":"the-japanese-talent-to-watch-out-for-during-the-2026-wbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/515485\/","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":515486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[257777,64,63,257779,228469,591,228470,257780,257778,85,257781,143382],"class_list":["post-515485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-atsuki-taneichi","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-hiromi-ito","tag-hiroya-miyagi","tag-mlb","tag-ryuhei-sotani","tag-shota-morishita","tag-shugo-maki","tag-sports","tag-teruaki-sato","tag-world-baseball-classic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}