{"id":312459,"date":"2025-11-25T09:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T09:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/312459\/"},"modified":"2025-11-25T09:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T09:11:08","slug":"shohei-ohtani-will-play-for-japan-again-at-2026-world-baseball-classic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/312459\/","title":{"rendered":"Shohei Ohtani will play for Japan again at 2026 World Baseball Classic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Four-time MLB MVP Shohei Ohtani will play for defending champions Japan at next year\u2019s World \u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/olympics.com\/en\/sports\/baseball-softball\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">baseball<\/a>\u00a0Classic, the Los Angeles Dodgers\u2019 superstar announced on Tuesday (25 November).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m happy that I will be playing for the Japan national team again,\u201d Ohtani said in a simple post via Instagram.<\/p>\n<p>Ohtani, the reigning WBC MVP, led Japan to their third championship in 2023 with a win over USA in the final, striking out then team-mate Mike Trout for the last out of the tournament in an unforgettable moment.<\/p>\n<p>The WBC begins on 5 March. Japan are in Pool C with the Republic of Korea, Australia,\u00a0 Czechia and Premier12 champions Chinese Taipei.<\/p>\n<p>The 31-year-old Ohtani won his second World Series title with the Dodgers this season. It remains to be seen if his LA team-mates Yamamoto Yoshinobu and Sasaki Roki will commit to the WBC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four-time MLB MVP Shohei Ohtani will play for defending champions Japan at next year\u2019s World \u00a0baseball\u00a0Classic, the Los&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-312459","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-mlb","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}