This World Baseball Classic could reportedly be the last one – CBSSports.com

We’re just a few months away from the onset of the fourth World Baseball Classic — the once-every-four-years global tournament that began play in 2006.

Turns out, we could be just a few months away from the end of the World Baseball Classic in multiple senses. That’s because the 2017 tournament could be the final edition of the WBC unless there’s a significant uptick in revenue, according to Cristian Moreno of ESPN:

This is sadly predictable. While the pretense of the WBC is twofold — to spread the game of baseball and hand out bragging rights through a spirited tournament — the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Major League Baseball might be making insane profits, but it’s not going to spend money just to spend money.

As such, fans of the WBC should savor the 2017 tournament as much as they can — it just might be the last time we see a global baseball tournament for a while. Or, until the 2020 Olympics, anyway.