The legend of Joey Meneses grows on the World Baseball Classic stage

After the home runs Sunday night — after Joey Meneses paused to watch the second, after he chucked his bat straight up, then peeked back to see it floating in the air — Benji Gil, Mexico’s manager for the World Baseball Classic, told reporters Meneses should have gotten his first shot in September 2018, not August 2022.That was easy to say once Meneses thumped Team USA with two home runs at Chase Field in Phoenix, leading Mexico to an 11-5 win. But Gil’s point drives straight to the heart of Meneses’s growing legend: Would the 30-year-old have been this good if called up earlier in his career? Or were 12 years beneath the majors a prerequisite for his success?“Of course I think about that all the time,” Meneses, a first baseman for the Washington Nationals, said in October. “I always knew I could hit at any level. I mean, at least I always thought that. But if I come up at, I don’t know, 25, maybe I don’t hit enough and they send me right back down. Maybe I never get back. I’d like to think I didn’t need more than 10 years in the minors. That was a lot
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