Premier 12 without MLB players

As we could expect, Major League Baseball has disapproved the participation of Major League Players during the upcoming Premier 12 Tournament.

The Premier 12 Tournament, organized by the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) is meant to replace the former World Cup Tournament, of which the last one was won by the Netherlands in 2011. That tournament was still organized by IBAF but after IBAF and the International Softball Federation merged into the WBSC the new organization wanted to organize it’s own World Championship, even though the IBAF and MLB had decided that the World Baseball Classic would replace the former World Cup.

Of course it is a shame that MLB doesn’t want to participate, especially if you know that a player like Jeremy Guthrie wanted to participate very badly, but if MLB would allow MLB players to play in the tournament they would devaluate their own World Championship Tournament.

For now only AAA players (that are not on the 40-man roster of an MLB club), AA players and players playing in lower levels of minor league baseball can participate.

Even though we already knew that the chance of MLB players participating in the Premier 12 was slim, it is a blow for the Dutch team. Now we cannot rely on players like Kenley Janssen, Andrelton Simmons, Didi Gregorius, Jonathan Schoop and Xander Bogaerts. To see such a dream team of the Dutch Kingdom play, we will have to wait until the 2017 World Baseball Classic again.

But of course also teams like Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Italy are bothered by this decision.