CLEARWATER, Fla. — Bryce Harper couldn’t look away.
Ninety minutes before the start of the Phillies’ first home spring-training game Sunday, as teammates moved about the clubhouse like commuters through 30th Street Station, Harper stood still in front of a TV and watched the NHL superstars from Team USA receive their gold medals.
Players skated victory laps with American flags draped over their shoulders. The national anthem played. Cue the team photo.
And Harper was transfixed.
For years, Harper has advocated for Major League Baseball to do what the NHL does and stop the season so that the best players in the world can compete in the Olympics. The next chance will come in Los Angeles in 2028, when baseball will return as a medal sport after an eight-year hiatus.
What would a global best-on-best baseball tournament look like?
Exactly what the world just witnessed between the U.S. and Canada in what Phillies manager/proud Canadian Rob Thomson described as “one of the best games you’ll ever see.”
It was so good that the Phillies put it on the new 42-foot-high LED video board at BayCare Ballpark as they took batting practice during the third period and overtime. Kyle Schwarber did an interview from the third-base dugout so he would be able to keep one eye on the action.
“Yeah, that was awesome,” Schwarber said. “That was amazing. Probably one of the more exciting hockey games in a long time. I don’t get to watch hockey that much, but that will probably get me back into watching a lot more.”
Which is precisely why MLB needs to follow the NHL’s lead.
Harper and Schwarber are among 10 Phillies who will leave camp Saturday to join their respective countries’ delegations for the World Baseball Classic. For two weeks in March, national pride will be at stake.
And players seem to be taking the WBC as seriously as ever.
Since the tournament’s inception in 2006, Team USA has had difficulty recruiting the best pitchers to compete in an international exhibition in the middle of spring training. But this time, both reigning Cy Young Award winners — the Pirates’ Paul Skenes and Tigers’ Tarik Skubal — signed on to wear stars and stripes.
Shohei Ohtani, who famously struck out Mike Trout to end the last WBC in 2023, will return to lead Japan, albeit only as a hitter. The Dominican Republic’s lineup is loaded, with Juan Soto, Manny Machado, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Julio Rodríguez, and Fernando Tatis Jr. Venezuela and Puerto Rico are stacked, too.
“This is our time to represent our country,” Schwarber said. “It gives you that motivation, you know? Being that we’re going to be heading into that and knowing what to expect. Obviously we’re not Olympians. But it’s our mini-Olympics. Right?”
Sure. And players will compete with intensity. Anyone who thinks it’s merely an exhibition, or that it doesn’t mean much to the players, should hear Schwarber talk about what he did with his silver medal in 2023.
“I don’t know where it’s at,” he said. “You only probably care about the gold one. You don’t want to get the second-place one.”
But because of when the WBC is contested, there will be pitch limits and other health-related restrictions. At training camps in Florida and Arizona, teams will cross their fingers and toes that their players return intact.
If anything, then, the WBC is closer to hockey’s 4 Nations Face-Off, last February’s riveting tournament that was still only the appetizer to the main course in Milan.
Still, as international competitions go, it’s the best baseball has.
Unless …
“I know Bryce has been very outspoken about it, and I think [the Olympics] would be great for us,” Schwarber said. “We all grew up watching the Olympics and being kids and just tuning into all different kinds of events. I think it’d just be great for our game in general to where you go to the Olympics and it’s worldwide. Everyone would see it, and it might reach a broader audience than just some countries that are really in tune to it.”
But would the players buy in? Part of what makes Olympic hockey such a draw is the passion exhibited by the players, especially among the Americans and Canadians, many of whom put aside being teammates in the NHL to beat one another on an international stage.
“It’d be a no-doubter for a lot of guys, where you get the opportunity to go to the Olympics,” said Schwarber, who played for Team USA in college. “When they ask you, you’re like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ And the cool thing for us is we have so many different cultures in our game that everyone’s going to separate from the [MLB] organization side of things and go to the country side.
“I know, if I’m freaking 50 and they go, ‘Hey,’ I’ll be like, ‘Yes.’”
Harper was among the first players to commit to Team USA for the WBC in 2023 but had to withdraw after undergoing Tommy John elbow surgery in the preceding offseason. He hasn’t played for his country since he was a teenager.
“I can’t wait,” Harper said the other day. “Representing your country, there’s nothing better. Nothing better. The feeling of putting ‘USA’ on your chest and playing for something so much bigger than yourself, representing your whole country, there’s nothing greater.
“And having Aaron Judge hit behind me is going to be a lot of fun, as well.”
When Harper at last turned away from the television Sunday morning and walked to his locker, he politely declined to talk about the game. He appeared emotional, especially after watching Team USA bring the late Johnny Gaudreau’s children, Noa and Johnny Jr., onto the ice as part of the celebration.
Watching it all, Harper surely must have thought about the possibility of 2028 in Los Angeles.
“We’ll see,” he said.
But anyone could plainly see what it would mean for baseball to have the best players in the world in the next Olympics.
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