The 2017 World Baseball Classic schedule is out

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Spring training is boring, old news by the time March rolls around. Don’t worry about that in 2017, though, as the next World Baseball Classic is happening from March 6 through the 22, so you can get your fill of baseball that counts well before the next regular season begins. Tiebreaker games have been introduced to determine the second advancing team from each pool in the first and second rounds, too, so we might even get more WBC than we’re used to.

Pool A features Israel, Korea, the Netherlands, and Chinese Tapei, and will play its games in Seoul. Pool B, hosted in Tokyo, includes Australia, China, Cuba, and Japan. Pool C is comprised of Canada, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, with games played in Miami. Finally, Pool D, played in Jalisco, includes Italy, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and host team Mexico. Teams from Pool A and B will advance to face each other in Tokyo, as teams from Pool C and Pool D move on to San Diego. Then it’s E and F in Los Angeles until we have ourselves a 2017 World Baseball Classic champion.

You can find the entire schedule in graphic form here, which is great and all, but it’s still disappointing that we’re seeing it released now when we won’t actually be able to see a game played for nearly another four months. We just have like, 90 percent of the offseason, Winter Meetings, the dead period that is all of January, and the start of spring training to get through first. It’s going to be a long winter.