New Padres DH Believes Dominican WBC Squad is Like the NBA 'Dream Team'

Nelson Cruz compares the Dominican Republic squad to NBA’s Dream Team

The World Baseball Classic will be set to get underway less than a month from now. This will be the first WBC since 2017 since it couldn’t get underway in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

All that is behind us (sort of), and the teams participating in the WBC are set and ready to play for the gold medal.

20 countries will fight for the gold; however, none are as deep and talented as Team Dominican Republic. Throughout the years, the Dominican Republic has produced some of baseball's best, and many of them will be playing this year. 

Four of their top players play for the Padres as well. One of them representing the DR is recently free-agent signing Nelson Cruz, who believes this DR team is like the NBA’s 1992 Olympic Dream Team.

“I don’t remember who was talking about it, maybe it was Juan Soto who said he saw the NBA Olympic team where they had so many stars,” Dominican Republic general manager Nelson Cruz told me in a phone call. “And it was like a Dream Team. That’s basically what we have.”

That NBA Dream Team had Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkey, and seven other Hall of Famers and all-time greats. And even though this Dominican Republic team is young, they have the talent and potential hall-of-famers to be compared to the baseball version of ‘The Dream Team.”

Padre stars Manny Machado and Juan Soto led the charge for DR alongside Vladimir Guerrero Jr, Rafael Devers, Julio Rodriguez, Wander Franco, and 2022 World Series MVP Jeremy Peña. 

According to Fanduel, Team Dominican Republic is the team to beat, having the best odds of winning the World Baseball Classic at +230, followed by Team USA at +250 and Team Japan at +300. 

It’ll be interesting to see how Team DR will gel and if they can play as a team, similar to how The Dream Team did so.