I need someone to explain the World Baseball Classic to me. Not the rules — I understand the rules, it’s baseball, I’ve been watching baseball since Eisenhower was a recent memory — but the concept. The concept is that Major League Baseball players go play for the countries their grandparents came from, and you’re supposed to root for them, except when they’re playing against the country you actually live in, at which point you are supposed to feel conflicted, which is a word I associate with therapy and not with baseball. I did not sign up for conflicted. I signed up for the White Sox. The White Sox are already conflicting enough.

Here is what happened: Kyle Teel, who is the White Sox’s best catching prospect and who I have been told repeatedly is “the future behind the plate” by people who know more about prospects than I do, played for Team Italy in the World Baseball Classic. Italy. The boot-shaped country. The country of pasta and the Pope and my grandmother’s maiden name, which I will not share here but which is, yes, Italian, and which technically means that I could also play for Team Italy if I could hit a curveball, which I cannot. Teel played for Italy because he has Italian heritage, which qualifies him under WBC rules, and because apparently when a country that is not historically known for baseball calls you up and says “would you like to represent us in an international tournament,” the answer is yes.

Italy beat Team USA. Eight to six. I watched it from Schaller’s on a Tuesday night, which is not a sentence I expected to write about Italian baseball, and I didn’t know who to root for. I’m an American. I pay taxes. I vote. I own a flag that I put on my porch on the Fourth of July and take down on the Fifth because I’m not an animal. But I’m also a White Sox fan, and Kyle Teel was on the screen wearing an Italy jersey and doing things behind the plate that suggested he might actually be the future they’ve been promising me, and when he threw out a runner trying to steal second I stood up in the booth and my buddy Carmine said “are you rooting for Italy?” and I said “I’m rooting for my catcher” and he said “your catcher is beating your country” and I sat back down.

Italy didn’t just beat the USA — they went undefeated in pool play. They beat Mexico. They beat Great Britain. They finished first in their pool, ahead of the Americans, which is the kind of sentence that, twenty years ago, would have been published in the Onion and which I am now writing in a real newspaper about real events that happened on real television. Meanwhile, Japan — Japan, the country that has won the WBC more times than anyone, the country that treats baseball the way Chicago treats deep dish, with a reverence bordering on the religious — got eliminated in the quarterfinals by Venezuela. Eight to five. The entire bracket is upside down. Italy is in the semifinals. Venezuela is in the semifinals. The planet has gone sideways and I am watching it happen from a bar in Bridgeport.

And then — and here is where the story becomes specifically and personally painful — Teel got hurt. Right hamstring strain. Happened during Italy’s win over the U.S., which means my catcher hurt himself beating my country, and now he’s probably going to miss the start of the White Sox season, which is in eleven days. Eleven days. The White Sox general manager, Chris Getz, said it’s “likely” Teel starts the season on the injured list, which is the kind of “likely” that means “definitely” but said more gently because there are contractual reasons not to say “definitely.” So the White Sox, who are rebuilding, who have been rebuilding for what feels like my entire adult life, who have a roster of promising young players who I was told would make this year different — those White Sox are going to open without their best catcher because he was in Houston playing for a country that my grandmother left in 1923.

I called my daughter about this. She said, “Dad, you should be proud that a White Sox player was good enough to be recruited by an international team.” I told her I was proud. I told her I was also furious. She said those feelings were contradictory. I told her they were not contradictory, they were simultaneous, and that if she’d ever been a White Sox fan she’d understand that simultaneous contradictory feelings are the baseline emotional state. She said, “This is why I follow the WNBA.” I hung up.

The WBC semifinals are this week. Italy plays Venezuela. The USA plays the Dominican Republic. I will watch both games. I will root for the United States because I am an American, and I will watch the Italy game because my catcher might be in the dugout with his hamstring wrapped, which is the closest I can get to White Sox content in mid-March that isn’t spring training. If Italy wins the whole thing — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — part of me will feel something that is adjacent to pride and that I will never, under any circumstances, describe as pride to anyone at Schaller’s. The World Baseball Classic is, I have decided, an elaborate mechanism for making baseball fans feel things they did not ask to feel. It has succeeded. I feel things. I would like to stop.