I'm not really a baseball guy so this very limited tournament has been a lot of fun for me. It apparently has been a lot of fun for a lot of people because the World Baseball Classic has been turning in big numbers for the events and in many cases breaking attendance and viewership numbers globally.
I guess they did a better job of advertising it this year or something because despite being a fan of all sports for the most part, I never knew it was a thing until this year.
Half of the quarterfinal games have already happened and if you are someone that is pulling for the USA, things don't look so wonderful for us, despite winning the first game of the elimination stages.
Today we got the Korea vs. Dominican Republic game and shortly thereafter the USA vs. Canada game. These were both exciting games or I should say one of them was... the other was a complete slaughter
Playing against the Dominican Republic is always a frightening thing for their opponents because despite the fact that they are a small and for the most part extremely poor nation, baseball is like a religion over there. I've been there, I've seen it, when you are landing in your plane before heading to your resort that is surrounded by razor wire and armed guards because the country is pretty damn dangerous, you can also notice that there are baseball fields everywhere as you plane heads to the ground.
You are brought up playing baseball in that special part of the world and they produce some of the greatest players of all time on a regular basis.
When they had South Korea in the first game of the bracket portion of the tournament, not many though Korea had much of a chance. I don't think we were expecting the mercy rule to get enacted at this point though and that is exactly what we ended up seeing.
Just 2 hits, none of which appeared to be a potential scoring position and just getting absolutely dominated. Being down by 7 after 3 innings doesn't feel very good and by the time the DR nailed down a 3-run homer in the bottom of the 7th the game was over. While it is technically possible for a team that hasn't gotten any runs at this point inside of two innings, it is incredibly unlikely and the rules state that the game is over at this point, it isn't optional even in knockout stages.
I do wonder if they would make an exception if it was the final game. That's worth looking up.
Now Korea barely eeked into the bracket stages so it isn't a surprise that they are going home after one game and had it not been them in this position, it would have been Australia most likely, and they would have faced a similar fate.
But let's look at the other side of this coin where USA faced off against Canada and I think if you were to ask most people they would have probably backed USA in this one, especially after they have made a few mistakes earlier on in the tournament and perhaps are taking things a bit more seriously now.
This one had people on the edge of their seats slightly more that the other game. While team USA did go up by a lot, Canada still had plenty of fight in them and got the Canucks all riled up in the 6th.
When you are ahead by 2 runs and there are 3 innings to go, you do not have a sense of safety at this point. Canada and every other team remaining at this point has proven they can make and break that deficit in just a single inning and this is why the real heroes of the game (from USA) side are being recognized as the pitching staff who with a great rotation near the end, managed to keep the hits from Canada especially in the 9th where it was 3 batters up, 3 batters down, all by strikeout.
This is the crazy thing about baseball: In innings 7-9 the USA used a different pitcher for each of the innings. I'm not really a baseball guy but perhaps this is a lot more common than I might be thinking.
Seeing this as the stats for the last inning of play when people are really nervous is kind of nice to see though and the fact that this guy gets paid $4 million a year as a relief pitcher.
But now we need to let reality sink in. If you watched both fo those games you feel as though The Dominican Republic is a juggernaut and USA is just kind of "there." There are a lot of reasons to be very afraid about USA's next game on the 15th and a lot of ways that the game could be a blowout for the Stars and Bars. I just don't get the vibe of domination from USA whereas Dominican Republic seems to brush aside opponents like they aren't even there.
Looking at the remainder of the teams playing, I feel as though the DR is probably the favorite to win the whole thing. They have already done it once in the past and I am sure they would like to do it again!