We have a new World Baseball Classic champion to add to the list of winners of this now-prestigious tournament. It also just so happens that the current face of the Atlanta Braves helped to push the team and his country to the winner’s circle. Ronald Acuña Jr. and Venezuela completed their dark-horse run by taking down Team USA 3-2 in order to win the 2026 World Baseball Classic.
Acuña contributed to the cause on Tuesday night with a hit and a walk over the course of three plate appearances. He didn’t score a run in this one but he finished the tournament with 10 runs scored along with seven hits, seven walks and two stolen bases. That’s good for a slash line of .269/.424/.538 with an OPS of .962 over the small sample size of tournament baseball.
Two of those seven hits were homers but there was no bigger hit for Venezuela in this tournament than the clutch RBI double from Eugenio Suárez that regained the lead for Venezuela after Bryce Harper hit a clutch homer of his own to tie the game up in the bottom of the eighth inning.
Simply put, this was an incredible game of baseball where both teams treated the situation with the magnitude that a winner-take-all game like this deserves. For Team USA, it’s a second-straight run to the Final that ends in disappointment despite the late-game heroics from Harper. For Ronald Acuña Jr. and Venezuela, it’s a defining win for the sport of baseball in that country and that team will surely go down in Venezuelan sports history for pulling off this great run to the title.
For Braves fans, it was certainly encouraging to see Ronald Acuña Jr. going at full-tilt throughout this entire competition and if that translates to the regular season then we should be in for plenty of fun once the season gets underway. Most importantly, Acuña got through this completely healthy and he looks like he’s firing on all cylinders. He was already a World Series champion but now he’s a World Baseball Classic champion — and this time, he was on the field to do something about it.
Congratulations to Ronald Acuña Jr. and Team Venezuela on a job well done throughout the tournament and congratulations to everybody involved in this year’s WBC for putting on an incredible show. Let’s do this again in three-to-four years, right?
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