After 12 days of thrilling games, the World Baseball Classic championship game has arrived. The United States outlasted the high-powered Dominican Republic to return to the title game on Sunday night. Venezuela came back to beat the underdog Italy team to punch its first-ever ticket to the WBC title game on Monday. It is fair to call Tuesday’s title bout in Miami the biggest game in Venezuelan baseball history.

“I’ve never been to the championship of the WBC before. We get there and we’re happy,” Venezuela third baseman Maikel Garcia said after beating Italy. “We’re excited to play tomorrow against the United States. We have to come tomorrow and play the same way we played against Japan, against Italy, and we have to show the world who Venezuela is.”

Team USA will be the home team Tuesday and the game will be played on American soil, but make no mistake, it will be a pro-Venezuela crowd. Venezuelan baseball fans have showed out throughout the WBC and especially Monday night against Italy. The atmosphere will be even more electric Tuesday. Here now is what you need to know going into Tuesday’s WBC Championship Game.

Team USA vs. Venezuela: Where to watch, odds

• Time: 8 p.m. ET | Date: Tuesday, March 17
• Location: loanDepot Park (Miami, Florida)
• TV channel: Fox | Live stream: fubo (Try for free)
• Starting pitchers: LHP Eduardo Rodriguez (VEN) vs. RHP Nolan McLean (USA)
• Odds (via FanDuel): USA -265, VEN +215, O/U: 8.5

Team USA lineup

1. Bobby Witt Jr., SS
2. Bryce Harper, 1B
3. Aaron Judge, RF
4. Kyle Schwarber, DH
5. Alex Bregman, 3B
6. Roman Anthony, LF
7. Will Smith, C
8. Brice Turang, 2B
9. Byron Buxton, CF

Venezuela lineup

1. Ronald Acuña Jr., RF
2. Maikel Garcia, 3B
3. Luis Arraez, 1B
4. Eugenio Suárez, DH
5. Gleyber Torres, 2B
6. Ezequiel Tovar, SS
7. Wilyer Abreu, LF
8. Salvador Perez, C
9. Jackson Chourio, CF

Head-to-head history

This will not be the first time USA and Venezuela meet in the WBC. They’ve met five times previously, including three times in 2009 alone, when the WBC format was much different than it is now. Here is a recap of this WBC rivalry:

• 2009 Pool C Qualifier: USA 15, VEN 6
• 2009 Pool C Seeding: VEN 5, USA 3
• 2009 Pool 2 Seeding: VEN 10, USA 6
• 2017 Pool F: USA 4, VEN 2
• 2023 Quarterfinals: USA 9, VEN 7

USA and Venezuela both advanced to the semifinals in 2009 and could have met in the Championship Game, but Venezuela lost to Korea in the semifinals while USA lost to Japan. Japan then beat Korea in the title game. In 2023, Trea Turner’s eighth inning grand slam turned a 7-5 deficit into USA’s eventual 9-7 win over Venezuela.

All told, Team USA is 3-2 against Venezuela in the WBC and has outscored Venezuela 37-30 in the five games. And you know what? That won’t matter even a tiny bit Tuesday. What happened in 2009 or 2017 or 2023 will have no bearing on what happens in 2026. Different players, different teams, different time.

USA’s offense hasn’t really broken out

USA blew out Brazil (15-5) and Great Britain (9-1) in pool play, which they were expected to do. In the four games since they’ve scored 3, 6, 5, and 2 runs. They’ve scored two runs in their last 12 innings, both on solo homers. For all the big names and big bats on the roster, USA’s offense hasn’t dominated against teams more on their level (i.e. not Brazil and Great Britain).

That won’t necessarily have to change against Venezuela. Team USA is fully capable of winning a pitchers’ duel (see: Sunday against the Dominican Republic), but this is a team built to punish the ball and wear down opposing pitchers. It’s an offense-first roster and the offense has been good in the WBC, but not amazing. Tuesday is the last chance for USA’s bats to wake up.

The bullpens may be short

It’s unclear whether each team will have their go-to relievers available Tuesday given their recent workloads. This is still spring training, after all, and USA and Venezuela will not put their players at risk of injury. After the Italy game Monday, Venezuela manager Omar López joked that “even Johan Santana is going to pitch” when asked about his bullpen for the Championship Game. 

This late in the WBC, we’ve got a pretty good understanding of who each team’s trusted late-inning relievers are. López has leaned on Eduard Bazardo, Andrés Machado, and closer Daniel Palencia. USA manager Mark DeRosa has run out David Bednar, Garrett Whitlock, and closer Mason Miller in the late innings of close games. Here are their pitch totals in recent days:

Tuesday would be back-to-back days and three times in four days for Bazardo, Machado, and Palencia. Teams don’t like to use their top relievers that much during the regular season, nevermind in mid March. Lefty Angel Zerpa, López’s trusted left-on-left matchup guy, would also be pitching back-to-back days and three times in four days Tuesday. His availability is in question too.

Team USA had an off-day Monday, so the Americans’ top late-inning relievers had that built-in rest. Still, Tuesday would be three times in five days for Bednar, Miller, and Whitlock. That’s a workload teams prefer to avoid at this point on the calendar. For what it’s worth, Red Sox manager Alex Cora said Whitlock will be available to pitch in the WBC Championship Game.

My guess, and I emphasize this is only a guess, is USA will have a full bullpen with everyone available Tuesday, and Venezuela will have everyone available except Luinder Avila and Ricardo Sánchez. Avila and Sánchez both went multiple innings out of the bullpen Monday, and it’s a lot to ask to pitch a second straight day after that.

For USA, righties Griffin Jax and Brad Keller are next in line to step into high-leverage work. Submarining righty Tyler Rogers, too. Venezuela’s next bullpen tier includes Jose Alvarez and José Buttó. In terms of sheer pitching depth, it’s advantage USA all the way.

Prediction

Our staff overwhelming picked USA to win Tuesday. I was the lone dissenter who went Venezuela and, honestly, I can’t give you a great reason for that pick. Predicting one single baseball game between teams that are reasonably evenly matched is a fool’s errand. This sport isn’t built to be predictable. If Venezuela does win the championship, it should not be a shock. It’s a very good team loaded with MLB stars, just like Team USA. I went Venezuela 6, USA 5 because, well, why not?

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Every March, millions of Americans fill out brackets and tune in to watch the NCAA college basketball tournaments known as March Madness. The men’s and women’s competitions unfold in parallel, each with their own brackets, champions, storylines and fan bases.

The separation reflects one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in sports: that women and men perform differently enough that they must compete apart.

The divide is so normal, it’s rarely explained: On average, men are faster, stronger and have more endurance. As a result, performance differences between men and women are often assumed to follow directly from these physical traits.

This notion shape how sports organizations structure competition, how coaches train athletes and how researchers study performance. Sex becomes a shortcut – a way to predict what athletes can do before they ever step onto the court.

As an exercise scientist who studies the physical demands of Paralympic sports, I wanted to know whether this assumption actually holds up.

My research on elite wheelchair basketball suggests it may not. I found that many of the differences widely attributed to physiological differences between women and men in sports are far less pronounced in wheelchair basketball players – and in most cases absent altogether.

It may seem that wheelchair sports are too different from nondisabled sports to compare. But in my view, they may instead reveal what sports look like when performance is measured by what athletes can do, rather than presumptions tied to their sex.

Although international competitions of wheelchair basketball have separate women’s and men’s teams, athletes at the national level often train together.

Testing different abilities

In most sports, presumptions about physical differences between the sexes appear early, often starting with elementary school physical education classes and youth teams.

Wheelchair basketball works differently. Although international competitions have separate women’s and men’s teams, athletes at the national level often train together, while women sometimes compete in men’s leagues and vice versa.

As part of my Ph.D. research, I examined how elite wheelchair basketball players move during competition by asking athletes from the Australian national men’s and women’s teams to wear movement sensors during five international-level games in 2022.

The sensors recorded how often players accelerated and decelerated, how frequently they changed direction, how fast they moved and how much distance they covered. Accelerations, decelerations and changes of direction are typically the most physically demanding movements in wheelchair basketball. To ensure fair comparisons, I adjusted all measures for playing time.

A consistent difference emerged. Players with less severe impairments – those with greater trunk control and stability – performed more high-intensity actions than players with more severe impairments. Female athletes with less severe impairments accelerated and decelerated more frequently and reached higher peak speeds, and male athletes showed the same pattern.

When I compared performance by sex, however, the differences were much less pronounced. Across most measures – including distance covered, average speed and high-intensity movements – female and male athletes performed similarly over the course of multiple games.

Performance beyond sex

If sex-based performance differences are so common in sports, why didn’t they appear in my research? The answer lies partly in how wheelchair basketball is organized.

To compete, athletes are assigned a classification based on how their impairment affects movement during play. These classifications range from 1.0 to 4.5, with lower numbers indicating more severe impairments. The system is designed to account for athletes with wide variations in physical disabilities, particularly differences in trunk control, balance and the ability to generate force and change direction in their game wheelchairs.

During games, teams must stay under a combined classification limit of 14 points for the five players on court. This means lineups are built around functional movement ability rather than sex, balancing players with different movement capacities within lineups so that no single team gains an unfair advantage.

Shelley Cronau, a player on Australia’s Paralympics wheelchair basketball team, grabs a loose ball in a match against Japan in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games.

Wheelchair basketball uses a system of classifications to balance the wide variations in athletes’ disabilities. Carmen Mandato/Staff via Getty Images Sports

With this in mind, it makes sense that classification, not sex, explained the differences I observed. In other words, wheelchair basketball is designed around physical variation in sports – not just between women and men, but across individuals with very different movement capacities and roles on the court. In this context, sex becomes one variable among many, rather than the primary basis for performance.

This pattern isn’t unique to wheelchair basketball. In wheelchair rugby, where women and men compete together on the same international teams, research has also found that game demands are shaped more by players’ classification and on-court roles than by sex.

Challenging sports science norms

My findings challenge a near-universal assumption in sports: that sex is the primary factor defining physical ability.

To be clear, there are contexts where sex-based comparisons matter. Differences in average muscle mass, body size and hormone profiles can influence performance in many sports, which is one reason competitions are typically separated into women’s and men’s divisions. Safety concerns are also frequently cited as a reason for maintaining separate competitions.

But when sex becomes the primary framework for understanding performance, it can obscure other important factors such as strength, body size, training history and access to coaching.

Research supports this idea. One study comparing athletes by both sex and strength found that many differences often attributed to sex were better explained by strength. Another review found little consistent evidence for sex-specific movement patterns in jumping and landing tasks, concluding that many reported differences are better explained by training exposure, motor skill or sociocultural factors than by sex alone.

Put simply, what is often labeled a sex difference may instead reflect unequal opportunities to develop physical capacity – much of which is trainable – rather than fixed, innate ability.

This perspective does not mean sex differences disappear, but it suggests that they may not always be the most informative way to understand performance. In some cases, focusing primarily on sex-based categories may even risk underselling what some young athletes are capable of.

Looking more closely at individual factors such as strength, agility, sport-specific skills and training exposure may give coaches a clearer picture of how athletes actually perform, rather than relying on long-standing presumptions about what girls and boys are capable of.

Atletico Madrid boss Diego Simeone has revealed he is a “big fan” of Tottenham captain Cristian Romero ahead of Wednesday’s Champions League last-16 second leg in London.

Romero was heavily linked with a transfer to Atletico last summer to join up with fellow Argentinian Simeone, but no move materialised and he subsequently signed a new contract at Spurs until the end of the 2028-29 campaign.

Tottenham’s disastrous season along with Romero’s own mixed form of two reds cards sandwiched between six goals has meant speculation about his future rumbles on, which led to Simeone being asked about his compatriot in Tuesday’s press conference.

“I speak from a point of view as an Argentina fan. I admire his personality, his character, his defensive work and his football ability on the ball,” Simeone explained.

“As a fan of Argentina, I have seen him play more games for the national team than I have for Spurs, but I’m a big fan of him, for sure.”

Romero’s expected availability is a boost for Tottenham at a time where they are set to be without at least 11 players for this second leg.

Atletico were already favourites to go through before a ball was kicked but last Tuesday’s 5-2 thrashing of Spurs has them odds-on to progress, but Simeone struck a cautious tone at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Simeone added: “We want to take the game in the direction we want to tomorrow. We will have our usual intensity that we had at home, we want to start on the front foot but Tottenham will want to start on the front foot and put on a show for their fans as well.”

First-choice goalkeeper Jan Oblak is absent, which means Juan Musso will deputise for Atletico, but Simeone said: “Juan is performing well and I am happy with his work.”

“The mile is a really cool event and it’s nice to do something different.

“I’m just really excited to learn and to move in. I’m not moving up full time, I’m going to go back to the 800m outdoors.

“I’m enjoying it so far. I think in the future I might be a great 1500m runner. So, I’m kind of dipping my toes in to see how it goes. I’m enjoying it, the training’s really good.”

With her recent indoor success, the two-time Olympian is pleased with her form heading to Torun, but insists her enjoyment remains the priority before the outdoor season.

Reekie spoke candidly about how failing to make the 2024 Olympic 800m final pushed her to prioritise her mental health.

The 1500m heats in Torun are on Friday, with the final taking place on Sunday.

“It’s definitely getting there,” she said. “We’ll see how I go this weekend over that distance. I’m definitely having a lot of fun, and that’s the main aim.

“I’ve got no pressure this weekend at all, other than myself. So, I’m just going to go out there and have fun and see what I can do.

“The past two outdoor seasons I’ve missed out on finals, so that’ll definitely be the first step forward to get into that final.”

Reekie, alongside fellow Team GB star Laura Muir, started working with coach Jon Bigg in March 2023, but has brought other people, including psychologists, into her set-up to extract small advantages.

“I’ve been with Jon for a while now, and we’ve been working on lots and I’ve got stronger and stronger as the years have gone by,” she said.

“It’s just adding in those one per cent gains and new people to your team, which I’m really enjoying. I think athletes always can work on something.”