announced<\/a> back in May he was participating in the event. <\/p>\nIt’s not a total surprise that pitching is harder to fill out than the position player group. The volatile nature of the position might make it so they would prefer to workout with their MLB team during spring training to stay on a regimented schedule. <\/p>\n
The 2023 team, for instance, was led primarily by relievers. Adam Wainwright, Merrill Kelly, Lance Lynn and Nick Martinez were the four pitchers who started at least one game. <\/p>\n
Kyle Freeland, who made two appearances out of the ‘pen, finished third on the team with 6.0 innings. <\/p>\n
A rotation led by Skenes and Fried would look very dangerous for the rest of the teams in the field to go up against. They still have to contend with Skenes, so the U.S. is set up just fine at the very top of the rotation. <\/p>\n
There will likely be some notable relievers on the squad, as there were in 2023 when Devin Williams served as a primary setup man and Ryan Pressly was the closer. <\/p>\n
Fried, who joined the Yankees on an eight-year, $218 million<\/a> contract as a free agent last offseason, finished fourth in AL Cy Young voting in 2025. He posted a 2.86 ERA and 189 strikeouts in 195.1 innings. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Despite a flurry of new additions to the USA roster for the 2026 World Baseball Classic, the pitching…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-339683","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\/339683","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=339683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}