WBSC U-18 Baseball World Cup 2025 Opening Round Stats Review: USA best pitching, offence; Korea, Japan best defence

After the Opening Round of the WBSC U-18 Baseball World Cup 2025 presented by RAXUS, the statistics indicate that USA are the best team both offensively and on the mound and that Japan and Korea have the best defence.

Ten-time champions USA are batting .344. Panama (.326) have the closest batting average. No other participant has reached the .300 threshold (meaning that a batter out of three gets a hit). Korea is hitting. 289, Japan .282. Chinese Taipei is hitting only .223. Puerto Rico (.167) has an even lower batting average.

Home runs won't help us rate the teams since the six Super Round participants combine only three. Still, USA and Panama are the teams that have registered the most number of bases. Panama has 56 total bases, USA have 53 while Korea rank third among the six Super Round Teams with 44.

USA also have the best earned run average (ERA), 0.44. It means that, on average, it takes more than 14 innings before USA pitchers allow a run. Japan (0.64) belongs to the same league. Every other team has an ERA above 1, with Panama representing the other end of the statistical spectrum with 4.07. It means that (on average) they need to score more than four runs to win.

Defending champions Japan join USA with the most strikeouts (46), with Korea following close (45).

Korean pitchers have allowed the fewest walks (6), followed by USA (7) and Japan (9). These teams rarely allow more than one free pass per game. By contrast, Panama (21) has allowed an average of over four per game.

Japan and Korea only committed two errors in the Opening Round. Again, it means that these teams rarely allow free passes. USA have four while the other teams allowed an average of one or more errors per game.

[leaders tournamentkey=2025-u18-baseball-world-cup]

Korea's Jiho Park (.556), Japan's Jiho Park (.545), and Will Brick of USA (.500) are the outstanding hitters of the first round. They all get more than one hit per two at-bats. Brick is also leading every hitter by slugging percentage with an impressive 1.000. The figure means that Brick produces, on average, one base per at-bat.

Three hitters offer impressive on-base percentage statistics. Hyuma Okabe (Japan, .684), Jiho Park (Korea, .667) and Grady Emerson (USA, .652) reach base safely in over 65% of their at-bats. Hokabe also ties USA's Anthony Murphy at five as the stolen-base leader.

Lan-Hong Su (Chinese Taipei) and Joel Kim (Korea) lead the tournament in strikeouts with 13.