This is the first time I am experiencing this because I never paid attention to it in the past and I honestly can't imagine why that is. This has been the most exciting I have found baseball to be at almost any point in my life and now I am hooked.
There has been some pretty nuts situations in the group stages where the outcome of a game determined the future of a team as far as going to the bracket stages are concerned and in one of those situations the team whose future was being determined wasn't even playing in the game in question. There might have been more than one instance of this happening actually.
If you were to do a survey of both fans and non fans of the sport and ask them who would win between USA and Italy I think that 95% of the world would answer that USA would win...They would probably guess that USA would win by a very large amount of runs.. Yet the opposite happened and I think most people were quite stunned. I tuned in late to the game and saw that it was 5-0 with a lot of the game still remaining.
I watched in a state of disbelief like I think most people were as the USA went down 8-0 before they even scored a single run. The States kind of rallied to get back to 8-6 but dude, coming back from 8 runs down isn't something that often happens.
There was a lot of talk about how the coach didn't take the gamer seriously, didn't even know who was in the bullpen and even after the game was over was still in a state of thinking that USA was going to advance to the bracket stages even if they didn't win that game.
Man was he ever wrong.
Now USA, always a favorite in baseball was facing the very real possibility of being eliminated in the group stages which as far as I know has never happened. The chance was low because as the above chart shows very specific outcomes needed to happen in order for USA to be sent home early and it wasn't very likely this was going to happen provided everyone played as well as they had in the past. It was still a very tense situation because anything apparently can happen in this tournament and with a slight Mexico victory while holding Italy to very few runs was unlikely, that would result in USA not advancing.
By the 5th inning all USA fans could breathe a sigh of relief because now it didn't matter how many runs either side got from that point forward, USA was guaranteed to advance. There is very complicated math involved in what is going on in this chart and I will admit I still do not understand it nor am I going to attempt to explain it.
I suppose it is a bit disappointing that Mexico, also one of the best teams in the world, will not advance to the brackets, but that is the way it goes.
There was another very tense game with Korea vs Australia where the result could have affected a team that wasn't playing in that game either, but in this situation it was a chance for a team to move forward, not get eliminated. Once again it was a very slight chance of that happening, but it was kind of crazy that someone who wasn't even playing could have their future affected by this game.
My friends and I kept trying to figure out the math involved in these things but couldn't, so we just accepted that there was a chance that Taiwan (Chinese Taipei) could advance even though they were not playing at the time.
This didn't happen of course but it was heartbreaking for Australia who was hoping to advance out of the group stages for the first time in the nation's history. Korea saw to it that this didn't happen and one of the really disappointing things was this was primarily the fault of one man who made quite possibly the worst attempt at a double play that I have ever seen.
Skip ahead to 7:42 to see what I am talking about
In a majority of possible outcomes Australia was going to advance even if they lost. The red area above is what had to happen for Korea to advance and that is exactly what happened.
Here's the games that remain and one thing that is for sure is that Canada would absolutely love to defeat the USA, perhaps for revenge on the ice hockey gold-medal game. I would say that out of these 4 games the only kind of clear winner is Dominican Republic winning over Korea. But you never can tell in these things. I'll be watching all the games from this point forward, that much is for sure.