When Team USA opens its World Baseball Classic on Friday against Brazil, it’ll do so with a particularly impressive lineup.
The pitching staff has plenty of talent, too, but pitching at the WBC is heavily complicated by limitations on individual workloads and plans for ramping up to an MLB season. The position player side is where the tournament captures the best-on-best feel, as countries can assemble a collection of their biggest names without notable restrictions.
In the case of Team USA, the 2026 group is a star-studded unit built around the top three players in the majors last season by fWAR (Aaron Judge, Cal Raleigh, and Bobby Witt Jr.). The lineup could change on a game-to-game basis slightly, but the best group is probably this one:
C – Cal Raleigh
1B – Bryce Harper
2B – Gunnar Henderson
SS – Bobby Witt Jr.
3B – Alex Bregman
LF – Roman Anthony
CF – Byron Buxton
RF – Aaron Judge
DH – Kyle Schwarber
That’s a lot of star power, and if you’re wondering if that’s one of the best lineups you’ve ever seen, that instinct might be wrong. It is a fair expectation that the country that produces the most MLB players would be able to put together a great lineup, but this could be on another level. The nine players above combined to produce the following line in 2025:
That collective production is pretty similar to Ketel Marte in 2025 (.283/.376/.517, 145 wRC+), a star hitter in the midst of one of his best seasons. A lineup of nine Martes would be a juggernaut, and that’s close to what we’re seeing here.
The question is worth asking is where it ranks among the best nine hitters ever put on a lineup card? It’s probably worth acknowledging that if you’re reading this on Sportsnet.ca, that answer may not be of interest to you because you’re likely to cheer for Team USA — for a variety of understandable reasons.
Jumping down this rabbit hole is for the pure baseball purist, or perhaps gaining a better understanding of how impressive it could be for another team to pull an upset against this American group, an outcome that you may find desirable — once again, for understandable reasons.
Is this the best USA team ever?
When trying to figure out just how great this lineup looks, the first obvious comparison point is other groups the Americans have brought to the WBC. Looking at MLB numbers, the lineup in the last game Team USA used in each of the previous five tournaments produced in the prior season (like we did above) yields these results:
The inaugural group built around veterans like Derek Jeter, Chipper Jones, Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr. was excellent — as was the last version we’ve seen, but the 2026 lineup is notably better on paper by wRC+. That’s the primary number we’re going to use here because of its value as an all-around offensive production statistic, and the fact that it is calibrated to league averages, making it a good number for comparing across eras. In un-adjusted terms, the 2006 WBC team had better numbers than the 2026 lineup, but those numbers were produced in a more offence-friendly era.
Comparing to other WBC teams isn’t really feasible here as the vast majority are made from exclusively MLB players, which makes one-to-one comparisons. Perhaps there is an argument that one of Japan’s WBC-winning lineups was the best we’ve seen in recent history, but it’s also not unreasonable to say that MLB is the sport’s top league, and it’s unlikely a group of primarily NPB stars fits the bill.
The Dominican Republic has fielded some MLB-only squads of excellent hitters in recent tournaments, but not quite at the Americans’ level by these measures. The 2023 squad had a 130 wRC+ together in the previous MLB season, and this year’s group only features one player with a wRC+ above the Team USA standard (Juan Soto).
All of that is to say this is almost certainly the best WBC lineup that’s been assembled in the relatively short history of the tournament.
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But is it better than any MLB lineup we’ve ever seen?
Between 1925 and 1930, the St. Louis Stars posted five of the nine best team wRC+ ever recorded, ranging from 128 in 1927 to the all-time highest mark of 138 in 1928. For reference, the much-lauded 1927 ‘Murderers’ Row’ New York Yankees managed a 125 wRC+, the 14th-best ever.
Those numbers improve significantly if we remove hitting pitchers, as the Stars did not play with a DH. That tweak means two of their seasons (1928 and 1926) come above the 146 wRC+ of the 2026 USA team — the only two such campaigns of the 3,450 teams that have competed in major-league history.
Considering how much progress has been made in a variety of fields, from nutrition to training over the last century, it would be tough to claim that the 1926 and 1928 Stars lineups anchored by Hall of Famers Mule Sutton, Willie Wells and Cool Papa Bell were truly the best of all time — but no one was better compared to their peers.
If we want to find an even remotely modern comparison, the best team wRC+ since the conclusion of World War II is the 2023 Atlanta Braves at 126. In other words, no one has been close remotely recently.
What about All-Star Lineups?
A World Baseball Classic team that draws on a player pool as deep as the Americans have is essentially an all-star team. The question is whether this one rises above the groups we’ve seen in recent MLB All-Star Games.
We don’t have to go back far in history to run into a roadblock to the idea that the 2026 American WBC lineup could be the best lineup of all time, or even the 21st century. That roadblock is named Barry Bonds.
Bonds was so dominant between 2001 and 2004 (232 wRC+) that the National League All-Star lineups he was a part of matched or bested this 2026 WBC lineup a couple of times.
In 2002, the starting NL All-Stars had a matching 146 wRC+ the season before and entered the game itself with a collective 150 mark.
The lineup with the best claim to the title ‘best lineup of the 21st century’ is the 2004 NL All-Stars. They outperformed this WBC group in the full season before the All-Star Game (148 wRC+) and matched them in the first half of 2004 (146 wRC+). If only for the ‘remember-some-guys’ value, here’s what that group looked like:
SS – Édgar Rentería
1B – Albert Pujols
LF – Barry Bonds
3B – Scott Rolen
RF – Sammy Sosa
C – Mike Piazza
CF – Lance Berkman
2B – Jeff Kent
If we narrow it down to the last 10 years, we find that several groups hit the All-Star Game with a better wRC+ than the 146 of this 2026 WBC team, but none of them managed that in a full season the prior year.
If we were going to flag a lineup in this group that threatens what we’ll see at the WBC for the completely fake title of ‘best lineup of that last 10 years, it would be the 2018 AL All-Stars.
Not only do they have the best full-season wRC+ of this sample of 20 lineups (141) and a stellar first-half number (152) in 2018, but the names are impressive:
RF – Mookie Betts
2B – Jose Altuve
CF – Mike Trout
DH – J.D. Martinez
3B – José Ramírez
RF – Aaron Judge
SS – Manny Machado
1B – José Abreu
C – Salvador Perez
That group has won eight of the last 10 AL MVPs, with the other two going to Shohei Ohtani and includes seven probable Hall of Famers and two sluggers in Martine and Abreu, who were among MLB’s most intimidating hitters at the time.
The biggest reason they don’t have a clear edge over the 2026 WBC team is Perez, who was coming off a middling offensive season (102 wRC+) and was awful at the plate in the first half of 2018 (72 wRC+).
Where are we landing here?
Even though wRC+ is a fantastic statistic for this type of exercise, as a tool, it’s probably not precise enough to make definitive statements like ‘this is the best lineup of all time’, or ‘this is the best nine hitters put together in the 21st century’.
A couple of the Bonds All-Star teams have a wRC+ edge on this group, and the 2018 AL All-Stars feel stronger, even if you could argue the statistical case either way.
The 2026 Team USA lineup is a cut above any MLB lineup we’ve seen in the modern era and any group the Americans have brought to the tournament before. It’s better than the majority of All-Star Teams we’ve seen recently, but not by enough that it is clearly the best lineup of the 21st century or even the last 10 years.
It is still an exciting collection of talent. The type that doesn’t come around very often in any competitive context. For some, it will be fun simply watching a lineup like go to work. For a larger group of fans, the fun will come in seeing if there’s a nation at the WBC that has what it takes to silence such a highly-touted group.
