The WBC - A New Dimension

I had intended to skip the World Baseball Classic finale. I was too aggravated by the lousy balls and strikes calls in the U.S. loss to Japan to really enjoy the whole extravaganza anymore.

But….there was nothing else to watch on a Monday night, not for me anyway, and this game was really intense. You could tell by just watching. The crowd was electric. The Japanese pitching was great. Both defenses chipped in with beautiful and unlikely double plays. There was a great outfield assist. It was a tight game. All the way……

The Japanese pitchers seem to have better stuff and more stuff in terms of pitch variety. They also attack the hitter very intelligently. They’re good at the technical things, too, such as holding runners on. They have very good control.

The Japanese on offense were like an Angels team on steroids. Lots of contact, lots of hits, lots of peskiness on the bases. But not too much in the way of power. But if you like sacrifices, and moving the runner over, Japan is your team.

If Japan was like the Angels, Korea was like the Yankees, but with a way better defense. The pitching was good but not great. But they had some big guys who could put the ball over the wall. And did.

The game’s recap today by most accounts focused on Ichiro’s hit in the extra inning to drive in two. But that wasn’t the story of the game at all. Not really. There had been a lot of baseball playing on both sides before that.

A few plays come immediately to mind, Ichiro’s perfect bunt laid down the third base line, the Japanese left fielder’s perfect short-hop stop, wheel and throw to second to nail a very surprised Korean. There were some very timely double-plays by the Koreans.

The Japanese presence on the bases all night long was all too evident. But they couldn’t do anything with it. Those Korean defenders were stout and stalwart every time they had to be. Meanwhile, the Koreans couldn’t get anything going early.

But Korea hung tough and finally tied it in the fifth when the monster Choo powered one over the wall. After falling behind again, they came within one when another big fella hit a looong sacrifice fly. And they finally tied it in the ninth on a two-out clutch single through the hole by one of the Lee’s.

If there’s anything that’s hard to really follow about Korea, it’s the number of Lees. I’m pretty sure there were four of them, and most of them did something important in the course of the game. There were also two Kims. I guess it’s no different than our Smiths and Joneses but I can’t recall seeing 4 Joneses and 2 Smiths in a game. I could be wrong.

The disappointing thing is that we’ll all have to read accounts of how we have fallen behind the Asians, and to a lesser extent the Latinos, in our national pastime. And I don’t think that’s true, or at least, not totally true.

We didn’t send our best players but the players we did send could have been better prepared to play if the Classic wasn’t held in March. On the pitching side of things especially, our guys looked raw. Peavy got creamed and so did Oswalt. I don’t think that’d be happening in October.

There was no Matt Holliday or Lance Berkman either. There was no Derrick Lee. I would have loved to have seen Joba out there on a few occasions. There are a heck of a lot of pitchers we could have used, but how many of them would have been any good in March? The timing of this thing is just really inconvenient.

While I think MLB would rather have this thing just go away, I don’t think that’s going to happen. And it shouldn’t happen. We can adjust our schedules every three years to make sure we’re prepared to field a team in March, selecting not only our best players, but also our most prepared players.

After the World Series in 2011, we select the team we plan on fielding in March. We keep them in shape, targeting March as the period of their best conditioning. We work these guys on playing as a team. We make sure they know all about hitting the cutoff man, bunting, hitting to the right side, you know, the things nobody in American baseball cares about anymore.

That doesn’t mean we’d win necessarily, but we’d have a hell of a lot better shot. We were a called third strike away from beating Japan the other night. We had to play a utility guy, DeRosa (who did a hell of a job by the way) at first base because we couldn’t find another. That’s obviously not optimal.

If there’s anything good about it, it makes it rather obvious this Classic didn’t have our full attention. So what have we really lost? But I’m sure our opponents don’t feel that way, nor do their fans. To them, Japan is the best baseball team in the world.

And that’s why we can’t just ignore the Classic anymore. As painful as it may be to change our ways and our timing, we have to treat the Classic as if it were the Championship of the World. The World Series sadly is just an American affair.

Besides, overall, we still have the best baseball in the world. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have guys like Ichiro playing with the Mariners or Dice K, the MVP of the Classic for the second time, playing for the Red Sox. Beltran, Delgado, Santana, Reyes…..they’d all be playing at their respective homes.

Whatever the truth may be, and the truth is sometimes too elusive to even take a guess at, there can be no doubt whatsoever that this Classic has added a new dimension to baseball, as much as we may dislike the notion. Be happy!
I

A Call for Instant Replay

Is there anything more frustrating in baseball than the terrible calls on balls and strikes? There’s no reason for it either. In this age of rampaging technology, there is no reason we should have to watch a terribly blind or paid-off home plate umpire call a third strike on a pitch that was at least a foot outside.

David Wright couldn’t save last night’s WBC game against Japan. He couldn’t overcome the bad call for strike three. He had to walk meekly to the dugout; he had to be content with whatever few words he managed to squeeze off to the fool or thief behind the plate.

The bad call decided the game. Japan’s pitcher Dice K was on the ropes. There was a man on first and second with just one out. Wright was the U.S.’s best hitter at the plate. Wright hung tough, fouling off pitch after pitch on the outside corner of the plate before taking the pitch that was obviously well outside.

But it was only obvious to everyone at home watching on TV and to everyone in the stands. The thief behind the mask thought it nipped the outside corner. As it was a breaking ball, he saw his opportunity to steal the game and he took it. He knew the next batter, Adam Dunn, wouldn’t have a chance. And he didn’t.

It didn’t really matter that Derek Jeter made it all moot by bungling a routine throw to first base in the next inning, keeping the inning alive so that the Japanese could put the game out of reach. All his error did was to hopefully keep him off the next version of the WBC USA baseball team. The game had already been decided. The umpire killed off the USA’s best chance.

I had been a big proponent of the WBC until last night. Now I’ll join the plethora of print and TV journalists trying to downplay the excitement we’ve been witnessing night after night. Speaking of payoffs, Major League Baseball has been exerting all its muscle apparently to coax the very worst out of these media hypocrites.

I’ve seen articles to the effect that the fans don’t care, that the players don’t care; this despite the evidence of our own eyes. I’ve seen ridiculous statistics pulled right out of their anuses to prove that U.S. baseball participants do worse with their major league club after playing in the Classic. We’ve seen the Yankees complain bitterly about a dogging-it second baseman whining about a sore shoulder.

But now I don’t care. If the games can’t be played fairly, I’m not interested. It’s too easy for the umpires to cheat, too easy for them to be influenced.

Much as the NBA tries to convince us that their referees are clean and fair, MLB and WBC officials will try to convince us that instant replay would never work for balls and strikes.

But a very similar type of situation exists in tennis. A ball or strike call is basically a line call. Tennis players are given three challenges. TV already has the box it throws on the screen. I’d be much more comfortable with that. You can still keep the idiots and thieves behind the plate.

I’ve had it with officials. Given any opportunity to fail, they take it. They would have us believe, in the NBA, that the stars really didn’t take five or six steps on their way to that driving dunk; they would have us believe that rookies commit all the fouls.

And MLB would have us believe that they didn’t know players had been shooting crap into their butts for years and years. They’d have us believe that they had no interest in increasing home run totals after the big strike. And they’d have us believe that it would be impossible to challenge horrible calls on balls and strikes. The same of course goes for the WBC.

Maybe the stakes in this event are too high to expect an honest umpire. After all, it’s not just the U.S. watching. The world is watching. They anxiously wait to see which team is the best in the world.

Japan takes on S. Korea now for the crown. But I won’t be watching. I’ll just spend my time wondering what Wright would have done with the next pitch, a pitch that might have been in the strike zone.