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The only major American professional sport that takes place outdoors in the summer is a suitably languid and loose-limbed affair.

Outside of the pitcher, catcher and batter, most men on a baseball diamond don’t stand at attention. The slow pace of the game leaves them free to scratch, spit and wool-gather while they wait for brief flashes of something to do. If things get too exciting, and action seems imminent, players will frequently call timeout to have a confab in the middle of the field.

Commentators fill the resulting hours of dead air with personal anecdotes. The all-time great baseball announcers are revered less for the way they explain the action on the field than their ability to weave a charming one-sided conversation through the occasional interruption of athletics.

Because of all this lollygagging, few games are worse suited to rock-ribbed military worship than baseball. But that hasn’t stopped Team USA from trying out a “stand up and salute” shtick as a collection of America’s finest players grimace their way through the World Baseball Classic.

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For the uninitiated, the WBC is a quadrennial competition between national baseball squads. It’s like the World Cup, if only 15 or so countries cared about soccer. The patriotism and pride of the players involved means that they’re definitely taking the games seriously, but the lack of much global presence for the game (outside of immediate US neighbors, Japan and South Korea) and its preseason scheduling leaves the games feeling much more laid-back than, say, the Summer Olympics.

Teams lean into fun aspects of their national culture as they make their way through the tournament. The recently eliminated team representing the Dominican Republic broke out into on-field dancing after they made great plays or completed a win. Team Italy, largely composed of Italian-American MLB players, greet each other with kisses on both cheeks. When an Italian player hits a home run, they don an Armani jacket in the dugout and take a ceremonial shot of espresso.

Team USA has taken the opposite approach, turning its deep run into the tournament into an extended chance to sing “God Bless America” over “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The players snap salutes at each other after great plays and have been spotted wearing tacti-cool T-shirts sporting slogans like “front toward enemy” (a phrase lifted directly from explosives used by the U.S. military). Team captain and New York Yankee Aaron Judge– an incredibly gifted ballplayer with a name lifted from heavy-handed ‘70s sci-fi – has repeatedly expressed the view that his team wants to win this one for the boys on deployment.

The team even brought in Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden in the 2011 raid on his Abbottabad compound, for a pep talk before their victory over Canada last week. He spun his yarn about shooting an unarmed 54-year-old man to a bored-looking group, while wearing some of his own merch.

At least for me, the far-off stares from Team USA give the game away. It doesn’t work to graft military themes onto everything American, no matter how hard the armed forces might want to. The battle against flyovers before sporting events has long been lost, but it’s still odd that games at Yankee Stadium involve a hymn to nationalism.

The language of strike forces and kinetic operations simply doesn’t gel in a sport so shaggy and unhurried that it has to remind the audience to stand up and stretch.

All that hoo-rah hokum would be grating in any possible year, but it's especially tough as the U.S. carries out a senseless air war against Iran. Should Venezuela beat Italy to force a final showdown with Team USA on Tuesday, we can only imagine the celebration of American might will come off as especially heinous. I’ve advocated putting aside your feelings about the American empire in national competitions in these very pages on previous occasions. But not this time: It’s entirely acceptable to boo the home team if they’re going to rub the worst aspects of U.S. military adventurism in our faces.

What do you think? Will you still be rooting for Team USA in the final? Click the speech bubble icon to sound off in the comments.

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