MIAMI — Well before first pitch during the World Baseball Classic, musicians march through the concourse at loanDepot Park, the Miami Marlins’ stadium, waving their country’s flag. Onlookers reach for their phones to film the packed walkway, and the volume only increases at game time.
Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees superstar who’s playing for Team USA during the WBC, went so far as to say the atmosphere has been “bigger and better than the World Series.”
“People are just roaming around wearing baseball shirts,” Miami mayor Eileen Higgins said. “You would think everybody in town was a baseball player for the past couple of weeks.”
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Strong attendance in Miami is a key reason that some tournament officials hope that going forward, the city could wind up a de facto, permanent host for the WBC’s final rounds — something the mayor is openly stumping for. This year’s WBC champion will be crowned tonight in an 8 p.m. match-up at loanDepot Park between the U.S. and Venezuela. Miami hosted the 2023 WBC’s championship game as well, and although the Marlins typically have poor attendance in their regular season, these tournaments have been a different story.
“Sometimes you don’t even have to look, you just have to listen,” said Caroline O’Connor, Marlins president of business operations. “And I think that’s one of the great things, that you’re hearing the fans and everybody coming and saying how exciting and loud the crowd was.”
A proposal process to determine future WBC sites will remain in place, and loanDepot Park will still have to compete against other venues. The tournament this year spanned four cities, with Houston, San Juan and Tokyo in the fold as well.
About six MLB clubs have already expressed interest in hosting in the future, said Jeremiah Yolkut, Major League Baseball’s senior vice president for global operations and events. Some of them traveled to Miami to check out the setup in person during this tournament.
But Miami’s built a case that, at the least, might be hard for others to top.
“As the tournament evolves, we always want to leave ourselves open to see what’s best for the tournament based on the market conditions and kind of where the game is at,” Yolkut said. “I think Miami is always going to be in the rotation in some way, but I wouldn’t want to make any sort of permanent statement about, ‘The WBC is housed here.’
“The unique thing about the WBC is it’s the one event where we have the ability to bring the game to places that are entirely in our control, as opposed to, let’s say, a World Series or other thing, where it’s dictated by play on the field.”
Close to 72 percent of the population here identifies as Hispanic or Latino, per census data, and both the Dominican Republic and Venezuela made the semifinal round of this year’s tournament. The teams’ fans have shown up in droves.
Team Italy’s manager, Francisco Cervelli, is also Venezuelan. After earlier games in Houston, Cervelli warned his team of the environment they would face in Miami.
“I told them, ‘Miami’s going to be worse,’” Cervelli said. “And this is where we have to take our time, pitch after pitch, because I was here in 2023 as a fan. I came to see Venezuela. It’s very noisy, the noisiest thing that I have heard. But it’s nice to play baseball like that.”
The environments in Miami have featured raucous, high-energy crowds. (Photo by Al Bello / Getty Images)
Cervelli and Italy were knocked out by Venezuela on Monday night in a 4-2 semifinal loss.
“Especially the last two games (against) Puerto Rico and now Venezuela, it’s just amazing,” Team Italy’s Vinnie Pasquantino said. “I played in the Dominican, it’s similar to that. It’s just not as many people.
“It’s just so loud. It’s amazing that the passion people have for baseball here and for their countries is incredible. And I’m so honored to have played in this tournament. … You’re just kind of nervous all the time, in a good way.”
One official briefed on the tournament’s decision-making process who was not authorized to speak publicly drew a contrast between the games in Miami and the later rounds of the 2013 WBC. When the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico met in the championship game on the other side of the U.S., in San Francisco, the stadium didn’t appear to draw as well from those teams’ fanbases, the official noted.
“Let’s say you’re living in the DR and you want to come to a game. It is less expensive for you,” Higgins said. “You get to fly up here and stay with your family, so it makes it much more of a family affair. But I can tell you, it doesn’t matter who we host.”
Higgins noted that there has also been no dearth of Japanese fans willing to travel to Miami.
Nothing has been determined yet about the next edition of the WBC, including its timing, although many in the sport assume the next iteration will be in 2029, just as the current tournament was held three years following the last. But all the decisions have to be negotiated between MLB’s central office and the players’ union, which split control of the WBC, and there’s been different thinking over time.
“We’ll make an assessment,” Yolkut said. “There’s obviously a lot of things between now and ’29 that will dictate some of our thinking on that, and we’ll work closely with the union on what makes the most sense.”
Historically, some tournament organizers have believed the WBC should be played every four years, and in a year when the Olympics are not held. Baseball will be played at the 2028 Olympics, and major leaguers are likely to be allowed to participate en masse for the first time ever, but the league and the union need to work out a deal on that topic as well.
“There’s considerations around the Olympics,” Yolkut said. “There’s a real question around feeding the international nature of the Olympics… is that best served in March ’29 or March of ‘30? And so we’ll look at the baseball calendar as a whole.
“I think four years is a long period of time. It’s not that we couldn’t do it. It’s just that after a couple of years, people are like, ‘When’s the WBC again?’ And by the third year, people are ready for it.”
The World Baseball Softball Confederation, the organizing body of baseball internationally, also gets involved in the scheduling question.
Once the tournament wraps up Tuesday night, the process of choosing the next tournament’s ballparks will begin quickly. MLB first refines its requests for proposals, the specifications it wants host ballparks to meet: everything from hotel rooms in town to space for media at the park. Then by the end of the year, the RFPs will likely be sent out.
“We’ve already talked to MLB, and they want to sit down and really talk about all the observations for this run of the tournament,” O’Connor of the Marlins said. “We’d love to be the host again.”
Higgins, naturally, sees an obvious choice.
“There’s just something about celebrating all of our different cultures that we do better than any place in America,” the mayor said. “Of course it should be permanent. I’ve been saying this for years.”