There are extreme liberties taken on these teams, much more than the World Cup does.
While true, that doesn't answer his question, does it?
I wonder why Ireland's never gotten a turn with one of these diasporic teams a la Italy or Israel. Surely a roster can be filled out with Murphys, Kellys, and O'Learys.
TLDR: Combination of (1) Ireland's team being ranked too low to even get invited to WBC qualifiers, and (2) Irish nationality law not being as liberal as Italy or Israel with who they will consider as citizens or eligible to be recognized as citizeens.
...hmm, maybe the sporting authority of the foreign country would have to agree to it, and that's a problem in this instance? Ireland has gone out of its way to focus on native Irish sports like Gaelic football and hurling and ignore imported ones like association football. And given the assaults on their cultural heritage for centuries, I have a fair amount of sympathy. Maybe MLB approached them and they saw it as "Ireland being used to burnish a foreign league's global reputation / appeal" and told MLB to pound sand.
*googles* OK, so Ireland
does have a
national baseball team, since 1996, and they've taken part in European championships and done some US barnstorming tours, but no record of them participating in the WBC. Odd. They have a domestic
semipro league with 8 teams, founded in 1997, and there's a 2006
documentary exploring the history of the league and the national team. Because it is composed of domestic players, Ireland's national team is ranked #51 worldwide, 22nd in
Europe (out of 86 national teams worldwide), and so maybe they didn't even qualify to go to the WBC qualifiers.
Looking at the history of WBC qualification,
- for
2013, the top 12 teams from 2009 auto-qualified and teams 13-16 competed with another 12 teams invited by the IBAF for a 16-team double-elimination qualification tournament with 4 bids. World rankings of the teams ranged from 5th (Taiwan) to 74th (Israel), but the 2nd-lowest was #30, so Israel got some affirmative action but generally you had to already be a moderately competent national team to get invited to the quallies. Israel, lacking its MLB players due to the games being in September, still competed well but lost an extra-inning affair to Spain in the game-to-go.
- for
2017, same format. Bottom-of-pool teams from 2013 had to defend their spot at the WBC against 12 invited teams in double-elimination qualification tournaments. Qualifier teams were ranked from #6 (Mexico) to #41 (Israel), 2nd-lowest #34 (Philippines). Israel's bracket was held in September, but they fended off Brazil and Great Britain to qualify without their top-line MLB players.
- for
2023, tournament expanded to 20 teams. All 16 participants from 2017 auto-qualified, and the 4 new spots were filled by 2 brackets of teams ranked from #13 (Panama, hosts) on the high end to #46 (New Zealand) and #31 (Pakistan) on the low end. Format was weird, 2 pools of 6 with the top 2 in each pool getting a bye to semis, in each pool the winner of the winner's bracket and the winner of the loser's bracket both qualify.
In all 3 cases Italy avoided having to qualify by finishing not-last in their WBC pools (they finished 3rd, 2nd, and 3rd-ish in their pools in 2017, 2013 and 2009 respectively). Israel only made it in 2017, where they beat Cuba to finish 3rd.
Also, MLB
notes that "World Baseball Classic rules state that a player is eligible if he would be granted citizenship or a passport under the laws of the country", which is true for Israel and diaspora jews, and any Italian-Americans who could prove heritage no matter how far back, but I believe for
Ireland it's tougher - you have to be born to a citizen, or if born to an Irish citizen who was living abroad at the time, have your birth registered with them. Which seems unlikely for most Irish-Americans, many of whom have been here for over a century.
So i'm guessing that for Ireland, the problem is that they haven't been good enough without their MLB players to earn their way up into getting invited to qualifiers where they might be able to use some MLB / MiLB players to make noise. Last summer, Ireland
played the Euro qualifiers, faced (among others) France, who
was at a WBC-qualifiers level, barely, and got
pasted 15-2 in 7 innings. And France themselves got smoked in qualifiers, 14-4 to Great Britain and 7-1 to Czechia. They're a long way out, I'd say.