- The World Baseball Classic begins late Tuesday night with Cuba-Netherlands, and other pools will open in coming days.
- The first iteration of this event in six years is ripe with intrigue, so how should you approach it from a betting standpoint?
- Expert betting analyst Sean Zerillo breaks down the entire field and makes his bets for the tournament, group play and more .
After a six-year hiatus, baseball returns to the global stage for the fifth World Baseball Classic from March 7 to March 21.
Past champions include the United States (2017), the Dominican Republic (2013), and two-time winner Japan (2006 and 2009).
A 20-team field will split into four pools. Each division will play a round-robin format. The top two teams from each pool will advance to a single elimination bracket, with the finals taking place at loanDepot park in Miami.
With an action-packed couple of weeks of baseball ahead, we’ll be looking to find an edge on these matchups on a game-to-game basis.
However, you might want to allocate some pre-tournament futures wagers to some undervalued teams.
To find those undervalued teams, I created a tournament power ranking: a combination of offensive, pitching and defensive/baserunning rankings for each of the 20 teams using the best data I could find.
For simplicity, I combined my multi-point power ranking into a list and numbered the teams from 1-20. If you’re curious how I would organize the teams into competitive tiers based on that ranking — I posted that list to Twitter.'
WBC Power Rankings
Elite
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