Japan Stands Alone Atop The WBC

The most dominant World Baseball Classic nation proved it again Tuesday night.

Truly, it was a baseball fan’s dream: Shohei Ohtani on the mound, facing teammate-turned-rival Mike Trout, with the World Baseball Classic on the line. Literally the best against the best, in a do-or-die game with World Series-level tension.

Ohtani, of course, got the better of the matchup, getting Trout — probably the best hitter of his generation — to swing through a pair of 100-mph fastballs and, eventually, a wicked slider to end the WBC and earn Japan the championship. It was a microcosm of Japan’s dominance at the WBC over the years: Other nations can rise and fall, vying for the throne, but Japan’s dominance is an undeniable constant of the tournament.

By the Elo ratings, the Samurai Warriors are unsurprisingly No. 1 in the current/final rankings for 2023. In fact, the difference between Japan and No. 2 Puerto Rico (45 points) is basically the same as the difference between P.R. and the No. 6 Netherlands.

Japan’s perfect 7-0 record joined the Dominican Republic in 2013 as just the second undefeated championship run in WBC history. And that year, the D.R. won its games by an average of “just” 2.8 runs per game, with a final Elo of 1563; Japan won its games this year by 5.4 runs per game, with a final Elo of 1599. Clearly this was the greatest single-tournament team we’ve ever seen at the World Baseball Classic.

And Japan is the greatest overall team at the WBC as well, with three titles, a 30-8 all-time record and nearly a +4.0 runs-per-game differential at the event — all of which easily rank as the best of any nation in the tournament’s history. With some small and short-lived exceptions, the trajectory of Japan’s Elo rating at the WBC is ever-climbing upward towards new highs:

The next WBC is slated for 2026, and we’ll see whether the rest of the world has narrowed the gap against its rivals to the East in those three years. But for now, the best baseball nation on the planet, and indeed the home of the game’s strongest heartbeat, is clearly Japan.