On 27 November 2014, the WBSC announced the creation of the Premier12 tournament, calling it "the new flagship pro baseball nations championship," which would be held every four years.[6][7] It was viewed as an event to fill in the calendar in place of the Baseball World Cup, since the World Baseball Classic took its place and an attempt to boost baseball's bid for inclusion in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.[8][9] The WBSC proposed that, if baseball did return to the Olympics for 2020, the 2019 WBSC Premier12 be used as a qualifying tournament.[10]
On 11 September 2023, the WBSC officially announced the third staging of the tournament for 2024, to be hosted in Japan, Taiwan and a venue in the Americas,[11] later chosen to be Mexico.[12]
The field of the tournament consists of the 12 best national teams in the world according to the most recent WBSC World Rankings.[6]
Across three stagings of the tournament a total of 14 teams have qualified for at least one edition, with 10 of those teams having qualified for all three events. Of all the qualified teams, the majority have been from the Americas and Asia and none have qualified from Africa. At least one team from Europe has qualified for every tournament and Oceania has had one team (Australia) qualify for the last two tournaments.
^"IBAF World Ranking Notes"(PDF). International Baseball Federation. 13 January 2009. Archived from the original(PDF) on 9 May 2019. Retrieved 23 June 2009.
