Today is the World Baseball Classic (WBC) Championship game! I don’t know who is playing yet, because Venezuela and Italy are duking it out for the final spot as I write. However, the World Baseball Classic is one of the greatest sporting events in the world (in my, albeit biased, opinion) and deserving of its own map.
This year the teams that qualified hailed from… Korea, Chinese Taipei, Australia, Czechia, Italy, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Brazil, Panama, Columbia, Israel, Nicaragua, Canada, United States, Japan, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. (Two others I can’t think of off the top of my head.)
Though I prefer cricket, I am a huge baseball fan, and I’ve never cared much for St. Patrick’s Day… so here is today’s map!
P.S. You may notice an irony with one major country not being included. Turns out I forgot to scrape those teams, but they are the least interesting in the grand scheme of things anyway, because they get a lot of media coverage already (i.e., whoops!).
Original Prompt
Hi there. Please create a map celebrating the World Baseball Classic (2026). It’s meant to be produced on the day of the Championship Game.
I’m uploading a CSV dataset with all the top league teams, their locations, nicknames, countries, lat/lng coordinates, etc. from each country. I would like to create a world map that starts with a view of each country’s locations clustered as a baseball symbol and a number in it showing the number of teams in each country. When a user clicks on the cluster, the map zooms to that country’s extent and show all the teams from that nation-state as individual points. When the user clicks on a team, add an info window over the point with all useful or relevant information in the spreadsheet to highlight the team (e.g., name, city, nickname, stadium name if there, etc.). If there is more than one league name in a country, color code the symbols by league affiliation and use that color as the font color in the info window when listing the league name.
Somewhere on the map, upper-left, upper-right, or lower-right corner of the map area place a small house icon that when clicked zooms the map out to the entire world again.
Give the map a pro-baseball title that is witty but not comical, e.g.: “America’s Past-Time; Global Sport”. Subtitle somewhere, not necessarily underneath the title but concisely saying something to the effect of “Major League Teams of All 20 World Baseball Classic Participants.”
Use a minimalist base map that has a light background suitable for thematic maps. Keep the map simple and to the point. In a hamburger menu somewhere inconspicuous add both a “Sources” option and a “WBC Results” dropdown button.
Sources should open a modal (which MUST not be open when the map loads) that shows all the sources for the map, including APIs, basemap attribution, dataset source (Wikipedia via Perplexity), cartographer “Ian Muehlenhaus (who prefers cricket but loves baseball too)”. Made with Web Mapper GPT (with a link to “www.webmapgpt.com”).
Make sure the map is visible and loads well in mobile (smaller title, etc.). Landscape mode required. Please add a witty little warning (e.g., something about curveball or something) to people in portrait mode asking them to rotate their phone.
The WBC Results button should open “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_World_Baseball_Classic” in a new tab.