PHOENIX — When Great Britain and the United States get on the baseball field, you can throw away the records.

Of course, there are not really records. And there shouldn’t be much competition. If Great Britain wins in its first-ever World Baseball Classic game on Saturday night against the Americans, it will dwarf the upset when 16th-seeded UMBC knocked off the overall top seed Virginia in the 2018 NCAA Tournament.

Heck, it would make the Colonists versus the English in the American Revolution seem like less of an upset.

Great Britain’s most accomplished player is Dodgers platoon outfielder Trayce Thompson — though the Brits also have the Mariners’ top prospect, catcher Harry Ford. Still, their batting order looks like Henry Ford’s Model-T next to the Hennessey Venom F5 Roadster (American-made, by the way) that is the United States’ lineup. American manager Mark DeRosa’s toughest chore might be telling stars such as Pete Alonso, Kyle Schwarber and Kyle Tucker they will not be playing in a specific game because Paul Goldschmidt, Mike Trout and Mookie Betts are.

The British have a King (Joseph King) at pitcher who is not listed among the Cardinals’ top 30 prospects, per MLB.com. The Americans will start Adam Wainwright, who has won the third-most games in Cardinals history. Wainwright is 40 and throwing in the 80s (mph), but he will probably not be around long before DeRosa unleashed one relief fireballer after another at Chase Field, home of the Diamondbacks.

Nevertheless, channeling from the Lou Holtz playbook at Notre Dame of making an overmatched Navy sound like the Vince Lombardi Packers, DeRosa said, “I’m not looking past Great Britain.”

DeRosa, a former Penn quarterback, added: “When I played football, it was respect everyone and fear no one. That’s kind of the way I am approaching this. I’m not going to treat Great Britain any different than we treat Mexico.”

The true March Madness would be if the Americans do not beat Great Britain, then win Pool C, which also includes Mexico (the second favorite), Canada (with Freddie Freeman) and Colombia. I’m sure it was not rigged that the Americans have the easiest pool draw (actually I do think it was rigged to try to gain the best possible American audience).

After all, this is not the NCAA Tournament, so fans are not filling out brackets for an event that already is underway in Japan and Taiwan. For the WBC to really catch on in the States, the defending champion Americans (the tournament has not been held since 2017 due to COVID-19) need to advance to the quarterfinals next week in Miami.

That would provide some momentum into elevated competition against the runner-up in Group D — likely Venezuela (Ronald Acuña Jr., Jose Altuve, Gleyber Torres) or Puerto Rico (Edwin Diaz, Francisco Lindor, Marcus Stroman) or the Dominican Republic (a lineup as formidable as that of the Americans, including Rafael Devers, Manny Machado, Julio Rodriguez and Juan Soto).

I do believe national pride around the national pastime would form and interest would grow if the U.S. played the Dominicans in the semifinals on March 19 and Japan and Shohei Ohtani in the March 21 final. There is no script, so who knows — maybe the British really will give the Americans a game.

The hope is that the tournament, which has 20 teams in four pools, will increase baseball’s popularity worldwide. A semifinal group that has at least the U.S., Dominican and Japan might put more prime-aged stars in one place at one time as perhaps anytime. MLB fans could be introduced, perhaps, to young Japanese stars likely to try to come to MLB in the next few years, notably power-hitting third baseman Muneta Murakami and pitching phenom Roki Sasaki.

What holds back the tournament from being all it can be is that there is no perfect time on the calendar for it to be contested. It either must be played at this time of year, or leagues in North America, Japan, Korea and Taiwan would have to shut down for a few weeks in July, or it would have to be played after the completions of seasons, when players are generally physically taxed and not looking to add that level of competition and risk to their bodies.

This time of year is probably best, but any time would lead to the other problem — MLB teams, in particular, are hesitant to let their best pitchers participate.

As American reliever Adam Ottavino said: “I just don’t see the aces making big money [participating] because they have such outsized value to their team. … I can see more the No. 1 or No. 2 starter who is not yet fully established and their teams think this is a great building block because of the level of competition. But for the older players, I just never see teams switching their stance.”

So Team USA does not have, for example, Gerrit Cole, Max Fried or Justin Verlander.

“For me, the 30 guys that are in that [U.S.] room are the right guys because they wanted to be in that room,” DeRosa said. “But I also think at some point, if this is going to go where it needs to go, that all teams and all countries would want their so-called best players, and it shouldn’t be as difficult as it was to put a roster together.”