The WBC-March Madness Pool You Never Knew You Needed

Ahh, it’s that magical time of year again! Spring training games are well underway, the weather is starting to mellow out, and a particular monthly-related other round ball sport tournament has everyone filling out brackets in the hopes of winning some cash and the expectation of losing it all at seeing amazing Cinderella runs. That’s right; March Madness is here!

We here at Over the Monster haven’t lost sight of that one bit, but we know this is a different kind of March. For the first time since 2017, baseball has its own tournament to trot out and showcase the international reach of the sport. The World Baseball Classic will be quite the showcase this year, with multiple teams stacking the deck with superstar MLB talent, including quite a few Red Sox.

As we eagerly wait for the first pitch of the tournament, we realized, “Why can’t we bring the fantasy fun of March Madness to the WBC to crown a true March fantasy champion?” Well, why not?

Over the Monster has created its own World Baseball Classic bracket to pair alongside a traditional March Madness bracket to see who can reign tournament supreme over the month of March.

For March Madness, we will be using ESPN as our bracket tracker, with no modifications to scoring. For the WBC, well, we had to get custom.

As the entry pools are round-robin and not automatically seeded, that throws a little bit of a wrench into a classic bracket. Here’s how we’re getting around that headache:

• For each team a writer correctly picks to come out of each pool, they will earn 10 points.
• From there, it’s a classic bracket, with each win correctly picked also earning 10 points.
• Bonuses are added from the pool round on for getting every pick of said round correct, starting with a 30-point bonus for getting every pool round qualifier correct, sliding down 10 points for each consecutive round.
• Picking the correct tournament winner as a whole will net a writer 25 points rather than just 10 points.
• Regarding tiebreakers, each writer was also asked to tabulate how many runs total would be scored in each pool and round. It’s Price is Right rules; whoever comes the closest without going over the total runs scored claims the tiebreaker. If that tiebreaker doesn’t solve it, whoever made the most correct picks is the next layer.

To guinea pig this tournament of champions, our cohort of writers participating includes:

• Jake Reiser
• Dan Secatore
• Mike Carlucci
• Avery Hamel
• Jake Deveraux
• Phill Neuffer
• Bob Osgood
• Keaton DeRocher

We’ll be back with periodic progress updates on the tournaments and to announce the true March Fantasy sports champion!