Outside the Beltway

Weird Sports Tricks

When international tournaments aren't international.

James Joyner · Monday, March 16, 2026 · 5 comments

A few days back, folks were stunned when Team Italy beat Team USA in the group round of the World Baseball Classic. Having only followed the sport casually, I was similarly surprised.* When, I wondered, did Italy get so good at baseball? Do they even play baseball in Italy?

It turns out, I was operating on a false premise.

WSJ (“The Espresso-Chugging, Wine-Guzzling Italian-Americans Who Took Down Team USA“):

Dominic Canzone had just launched a titanic home run for Italy in the World Baseball Classic, so he knew what awaited him after he rounded the bases: a scalding shot of espresso, made right in the dugout.

[…]

A bigger challenge than winning ballgames, it turns out, has been understanding the nuances of Italian culture. That’s because Italy’s roster has one glaring omission—actual Italians.

Baseball is a niche sport in soccer-crazed Italy. Only two born-and-raised Italians have ever reached the majors. And only three players participating in the WBC hail from Italy.

As a result, Italy’s WBC roster is composed mostly of Italian-American big-leaguers and prospects who weren’t chosen for Team USA but were eligible under the tournament’s heritage rules. Some of them have never actually been to the homeland.

This minor detail does not apparently keep actual Italians from savoring the victory.

“People, we beat the Americans at baseball,” wrote Italy’s Gazzetta Dello Sport. “Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn, and all that.”

At the heart of this run has been Pasquantino, a slugging first baseman for the Kansas City Royals who is the team’s most fearsome hitter and unofficial recruiting coordinator. He joined Team Italy in 2023 to honor his Italian grandfather, then spent the next few years championing the squad to anyone he could find with an Italian branch on their family tree.

[…]

The Italian players aren’t naive to the fact that most of them aren’t really Italian. They hope that in the future, the national baseball team doesn’t need players like them at all.

This run of success at the WBC should only help. Even Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni highlighted the team’s success in parliament.

“The right parties and the left parties are all clapping their hands for the baseball team,” Mazzieri said. “It’s quite incredible.”

So, to the extent that the purpose of the tournament is to expand baseball’s frontprint, I suppose having an Italian-American team with Italia on their jerseys and mimicking Italian culture is useful. And, of course, many of the other teams in the tournament (Japan, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, etc.) have strong baseball traditions and have actual citizens to fill out their team.**

Regardless, the American-Americans rallied from their early loss to reach the tournament final, to be played tomorrow. The Italian-Americans will play the Dominican Republic at 8 pm Eastern tonight for a chance at a rematch with the American-Americans for the world championship. (Not to be confused with the annual World Series,*** which consists entirely of teams from the United States [and occasionally Canada] but players from around the world.)

This sort of thing happens, albeit with less frequency, in the Olympics, World Cup, and other more established international competitions. I’ve always found it, at best, odd and, at worst, weirdly unpatriotic. Why would you want to represent some other country against your own?

Finally, there’s a bit of irony here. Italy recently changed its citizenship law to make it harder for Italian-Americans to play on Team Italia.

CNN (“Italy ruling tells millions with Italian roots they have lost the right to citizenship“):

On Thursday the Constitutional Court said it would rule in favor of the government and its controversial 2025 law that restricted citizenship for those born abroad. The law — issued last March via emergency decree — had been challenged by four judges, who questioned its constitutionality.

[…]

The announcement will be a devastating blow for those who believed the court would uphold Italy’s 160-year history of citizenship by descent, or ius sanguinis.

[…]

Previously, Italians who moved abroad could pass citizenship to their children as long as they didn’t renounce or lose it, often by acquiring another nationality. What many now see as the country of the “dolce vita” was once an impoverished nation that, between 1861 and 1918, saw 16 million citizens emigrate for a better life.

Many who left out of necessity rather than volition considered themselves Italian for life, and chose to retain their citizenship while living and working abroad — meaning that citizenship, along with cultural traditions, was passed down the generations.

[…]

However, a law introduced on March 28 last year by emergency decree states that only those with a parent or grandparent born in Italy will be recognized as citizens. It also effectively outlaws dual citizenship for the diaspora, as that parent or grandparent must have held solely Italian citizenship at the time of their descendant’s birth, or at their own death if it came earlier.

So, some of these Italian-Americans might have to play for their own country next go-round.

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*Although, frankly, baseball has always been a series, rather than a single-elimination sport, for good reason. Any given game’s results can be quite fluky.

**I’ve also never understood how, for example, Puerto Rico, part of the United States, has its own team. But it’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

***For what it’s worth, New York Yankees and TEAM USA star Aaron Judge, says WBC’s atmosphere is “bigger and better” than the older North America-centric tournament.