Baseball as it has been played for over 100 years is better and that is how they played the Classic.
I mean, I suspect you are being over the top a bit to make a point. But this is just silly.
They had the DH in the WBC. No starter pitched a full game (in fact, many were on strict pitch/usage counts from their MLB clubs). Nobody was wearing metal spikes. How many head first slides did you see? There were "closers". How many of the guys playing have full time jobs in the offseason? Nobody was throwing a ball with a rubber core or without raised stitches. All these things have changed in baseball over the years. To say that the WBC was some exact copy of how Lou Gehrig and Hank Greenberg played it is as false as saying Babe Ruth could hit a ball to the moon.
As with most sports, baseball has always been a living thing that changed and evolved. Sometimes it was due to rules (the wild card, interleague play, etc) and sometimes it was because of tactics (the 3 true outcomes, analytics, etc) and sometimes it was because of outside forces (cork for balls & the AAGPBL during wartime). But it has never stayed the same.
All of this just to shorten the game by 20 minutes so it more conveniently fits int a TV time slot?
You do realize that all the pitch clock rules have done is to roll back the game length to what it was in the mid 90's, right? All the stepping out of the batters box and walking around the mound and other time wasting stuff is all from the past ~25 years. It wasn't always in baseball. The games didn't always take this long. Pitchers didn't always work this slowly. Hitters used to somehow be able to keep their gloves from falling off without adjusting them every pitch.
In what was, at least until the next week, probably the most important moment ever for Mariners fans (the one game 1995 playoff with LAA to make the playoffs for the first time ever, Randy vs former SEA ace Langston), the game took 2:50. Virtually identical to the 2:45 average length during 2023 spring training.
