Where was Team USA's star closer?! How pitching restrictions rocked an otherwise epic WBC

MIAMI -- The ninth inning had arrived with the score tied after one swing of Bryce Harper's bat seemed to jolt the United States to life, a momentum shift that felt like the precursor for a championship.

Team USA needed three outs to take its turn on offense with a chance to walk it off. But Mason Miller, the world's best closer, remained idle.

In this setting, with save opportunities no longer available, Miller typically would've been the obvious choice to pitch the top of the ninth. Not deploying him, in fact, would've been malpractice. But even making him available for the finale of this World Baseball Classic took convincing. Miller had appeared twice over the previous five days. The San Diego Padres, who will rely on him heavily over these next six months, told Team USA they only wanted him pitching if absolutely necessary -- which, in this case, meant a save situation. So Miller watched from the bullpen as Garrett Whitlock surrendered the winning run.

"Honoring the Padres," said Team USA manager Mark DeRosa, speaking after his team's 3-2 loss to Venezuela on Tuesday night, when asked why Miller didn't pitch. "Had we taken the lead, he was coming in. But I wasn't going to bring him into a tied game."

The WBC, which just concluded its sixth installment, has reached undeniable levels of popularity. Fans throughout the world are heavily invested. Players -- even the American-born ones who previously struggled to grasp the significance of international competition -- have fully bought in. But two obstacles continue to prevent the WBC from meeting the stakes and reaching its potential.

One is the growing difficulty of getting contracts insured, and the number of players who did not participate because of it. The other is the usage of pitchers who would otherwise be in spring training preparing for Major League Baseball's regular season, and the team executives who constantly worry about their health. Nobody knows that better than those tasked with communicating with them over these past couple of weeks.

"They were blowing up my phone with all their restrictions," one WBC coach lamented.

Team Venezuela manager Omar López felt those restrictions the morning of the biggest game of his life. López had relied heavily on his bullpen to defeat Italy on Monday night and awoke Tuesday morning to text messages from three different teams imploring him not to use their relievers on a second straight night.

"Oh God," López said to himself, "here we go again."

López was on the verge of delivering a championship to Venezuela, a baseball-obsessed country navigating unprecedented political turmoil and clinging to its national team like never before. The stakes were unimaginable. But suddenly there were road blocks from people who couldn't care less about international competition.

"What's wrong?" López's wife asked. "Same s---," he responded.

López put his head back on his pillow to collect his thoughts and made a decision.

"You know what," López recalled saying, "I'm going to write these people back. I'm going to fight for these players."

To many of the players, and those around them, this tournament has come to mean just as much, if not more, than their major league seasons. Future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols spoke openly about how managing the Dominican Republic through this year's tournament qualified as the best experience of his baseball life. Roman Anthony and Gunnar Henderson, early in careers primed for superstardom, both said they'd take advantage of every opportunity to play in the WBC moving forward. Tarik Skubal, a pending free agent poised to land the largest pitcher contract ever, was visibly torn about making another start for Team USA. Even before winning the championship for his country, Ronald Acuña Jr. stated that this is more important than anything he'll ever do in the major leagues.

"I love Atlanta a lot, but before I played in Atlanta, I was born in Venezuela," Acuña said. "Venezuela made Ronald Acuña Jr."

Eduard Bazardo of the Seattle Mariners, Angel Zerpa of the Milwaukee Brewers and Daniel Palencia of the Chicago Cubs ultimately appeared in their second straight game for Venezuela, coming in relief of a highly effective Eduardo Rodríguez. Together, they shut down a potent Team USA lineup and pushed Venezuela to its first WBC championship.

Viewership numbers for that game, broadcast on FOX, have yet to be released, but even without them, this year's tournament has featured four of the top five and six of the top nine most viewed WBC games in the U.S., according to MLB. The highly anticipated semifinal matchup between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic averaged a WBC-record 7.4 million viewers, even though it didn't air on broadcast television. The finale is expected to surpass it.

The WBC set an attendance record of 1,306,414 in 2023; this year's topped it at 1,619,839. Through the semifinals, social media posts from the official accounts of MLB, MLB Español and the World Baseball Classic had generated more than 2.24 billion global views across platforms. The tournament's growth in popularity has seemed to run parallel to the players' enthusiasm.

How their availability can meet that, in a way that satisfies teams and agents with competing interests, remains an open question. One possibility that has been discussed is a change in timing, which could get a test run in 2028.

The Summer Olympics will take place in Los Angeles then, prompting a big push for major league players to get involved. If that comes to pass, MLB would elongate its All-Star break to accommodate it. The participation of star players -- particularly from the U.S., Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, the three teams from the Americas that have already qualified -- will probably resemble that in the WBC.

The circumstances of the Olympics could also create a template for the WBC to move its tournament to the middle of the summer.

"As the game continues to evolve, we have talked about midseason tournaments in general," MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "And certainly if we decided to get serious about this, about a midseason tournament, this would be an ideal opportunity."

Whether that will impact pitcher usage remains an open question.

DeRosa, for one, believes so.

"They would be more prepared and more dialed in, and we'd be dealing with way less restrictions and way less guidelines on the pitching if it was moved to midseason," DeRosa said. "No question about it."

Some coaches, players and agents queried by ESPN agreed, noting that starting pitchers would be fully stretched out by then and not beholden to meeting specific checkpoints with a regular season approaching. Others pushed back, noting that pitchers would be far less fresh by that point and that the fears of their teams -- not to mention their agents -- would not subside.

"They don't see upside in this," a WBC official said of teams watching their pitchers participate in the tournament. "They only see downside."

It's understandable. Teams pay players for their services during the major league season. Contributing elsewhere can only hinder their ability to do so. That dynamic will never change. For pitchers, the circumstances will always be more fraught. And while teams are not allowed to prevent their players from participating in the WBC -- so long as they're healthy and their contracts are insured -- there's nothing to keep them from dictating their usage in it.

This year, it meant Shohei Ohtani only hit for Japan. It meant Skubal made just one start, against an inferior Great Britain team, for the U.S. It meant Luis Castillo wasn't there for the Dominican Republic. It meant José Álvarez, a longtime lefty reliever three years removed from his last major league game and recently throwing in a men's league, had to be included in Venezuela's roster.

It meant that, when it mattered most, Mason Miller could only watch.