Dutch jump two spots on world ranking

The World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) today unveiled the newly updated WBSC Baseball World Rankings, which weigh a country’s National Team performance, from U-12 to Professional, in official WBSC-sanctioned international competitions over a four-year period (2015-2018).

Those countries that finish with the first twelve teams at the end of this year, automatically qualify for the Premier 12 tournament in 2019 which serves partially as a qualifier for the 2020 Olympics.

In October, the U23 World Cup will be the final chance to earn points for the world ranking. The tournament in Columbia will be attended by the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Czech Republic as European representatives.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands earned a total of 261 points thanks to the performances by several Dutch national (youth) teams. Thanks to these results the Dutch surpassed Australia and Canada. The U15 team finished eighth during this year’s World Cup and left Australia behind. The U18 won the European Championship and the Dutch senior team won the Super 6 tournament last week.

The USA and Japan remain the numbers 1 and 2 in the world ranking. Also Korea and Cuba remained at their previous spots: 3 and 4. Even though Taiwan earned the most points (645) it only climbed one spot to the fifth place and surpassed Mexico that dropped to the sixth spot.