Collette Calls: Breaking Down the WBC Batters

The effort into producing the annual installments of Bold Predictions and Values in the Scrap Heap are behind me and it is time to move forward with weekly topics.

I have shared this before, but the toughest part of writing about fantasy baseball hits as soon as the season starts because every stat is in a small sample size. Content schedules do not care, though, so I am always appreciative when someone suggests a topic to write about. This is one of those articles, as the topic comes from my good buddy and 2025 Moneyball Champion Jeff. I've auctioneered the Moneyball league for 10 years now, and this was the first time Jeff has won the league in that time and it apparently came down to the final moments of the season when Brayan Rocchio hit that walk-off home run and helped Jeff hold onto a tenuous half-point lead that was at risk over three counting categories heading into the final day. 

Jeff is not only a champion, he is fanatical about the World Baseball Classic. He attended the last round down in Miami and thoroughly enjoyed himself and recently asked me whether there was any impact on players who participated in the World Baseball Classic. Outside of the obvious ones with Edwin Diaz shredding his ACL in celebration or Jose Altuve sustaining a thumb fracture and missing 43 games in 2023, I honestly did not know if there was any type of WBC boost or hangover effect. So, this week's column digs into that question to see whether the players who represent their respective countries in the upcoming tournament have an advantage over those who are just putting in the work in Florida and Arizona around golf outings and card games. 

My initial thought before digging into the numbers was that there would be some benefit to those participating in the WBC because of the intensity and competitiveness of the games. Spring training is mostly an exhibition thing early on with players getting the work in or working on new pitches in their efforts to shake off the rust that accumulates in the offseason. Players these days do more in the offseason than their counterparts did years ago, but the reps remain important because we know from the work in The Process that hitters and pitchers need their time to be ready for the regular season. Their work found pitchers need to throw 10-to-15 innings of work in games to be ready for the regular season, while it is best for hitters to exceed the 30-plate-appearance threshold. I am too depressed with recent pitching injuries to look into anything level-headed, so I will focus on the hitters here while I weep for the elbows on the Atlanta pitching staff. 

To start, I needed to find the hitters who met two conditions -- they both participated in the WBC and began the 2023 regular season with a big-league club. I first found the qualified hitters from the 2023 WBC and then created a custom report at Fangraphs showing all the qualified WBC hitters who had at least 40 plate appearances over the first two weeks of the 2023 regular season. That report gave me a sample size of 36 hitters to review. The collective numbers of that group were as such compared to the league as a whole. I could not easily extract the 36 names from the 845 overall hitters from the first two weeks of 2023, but I was able to narrow it down to compare the overall numbers of the 196 hitters who had at least 40 plate appearances over the first two weeks of the 2023 regular season:

The data shows that there was nothing much to be gained if the thought was that the increased level of competition would lead to better zone discipline, as there is a negligible difference between the two groups. There is a noticeable difference with the slugging and wRC+, but that can largely be dismissed to the quality of names representing the all-star teams for each country, which does not include players who played for terrible regular season teams. 

I took another angle and looked at the same players who had at least 40 plate appearances to begin the 2022 season to see how a normal spring of preparation worked for them, but even that included the curveball of the 2022 lockout that delayed the start of spring training and pushed the regular season start date back into early April. The 30 hitters who were in both sample sizes improved the year before by 20 percent with a simple group averaging, but 13 of the 30 players had better starts to the 2023 season than they had in 2022:

I hesitate to draw any conclusions from such small sample sizes because we also have to look at the other end of the spectrum to see the hitters who did worse the first two weeks of 2023 compared to 2022:

In short, I see neither a risk nor a reward for players participating in the World Baseball Classic. Some players have indeed come out of the gate hot after doing well in the WBC, but that behavior is not specific to them because hot starts can come from anywhere at any time. Wilmer Flores hit a third of his 2025 home runs in the first two weeks of the season while Oneil Cruz had seven of his 38 steals in the first 12 games because he reached base at a 36 percent clip. 

Crash Davis once told us that if you believe you're playing well because you're wearing women's underwear, then you are! If you want to believe the players in the WBC have a head start on those not in it, I am not here to say you are wrong, but the recent data does not show you are exactly right, either. These things work themselves out over the course of a season, but if your goal is to get off to a hot start and bank as much offense as you can out of the gate, I can certainly respect using WBC participation as a tiebreaker between two similar players. However, it's not something I would build a draft strategy around.

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