Thanks to Italy beating Mexico on Wednesday night, the United States gets another chance in the World Baseball Classic.
What looked like a potentially disastrous early exit for Team USA manager Mark DeRosa and the boys turned out to be nothing more than substantial worry and significant embarrassment for about 24 hours.
It remains to be seen if the U.S. really wants to win badly enough for the reprieve to matter, as if it’s just a switch they can flick. But there is little reason for Team USA fans to be optimistic.
The Americans’ attitude and behavior have been all over the place when it comes to their opinion of the WBC’s value. It’s no Olympics, after all, as slugger Bryce Harper would prefer. How important is the WBC to the U.S.? Less important than it is to the other teams in the tournament.
Team USA didn’t appear to compete with urgency against Italy on Tuesday, playing as if it already had qualified for the quarterfinals. And it wasn’t just overconfidence. The players mimicked the leadership of DeRosa, who operated as though he were just trying to get through a mostly meaningless game.
Only, the U.S. hadn’t qualified yet. DeRosa seemed to get lost in the WBC’s tiebreaking procedures, which in itself is understandable if you don’t know how to work an abacus and slide rule. But someone on his staff should have figured out that the Italy game mattered before DeRosa went on TV and said the U.S. already had punched its own ticket for the next round.
If Mexico had beaten Italy on Wednesday, or if Italy hadn’t scored the right amount of runs, or if everything went sideways in extra innings, we’d be talking about the U.S. getting its ticket punched in a bad way.
DeRosa said later that he only “misspoke,” but it was more like he misunderstood completely. He assembled a questionable lineup and made questionable pitching decisions, leading a collective effort that appeared to gain clarity and urgency only in the final third of the game. Did someone finally figure out what the dugout hadn’t figured it out?
Team USA next plays Canada on Friday night in Houston, a game the hosts should win — although that’s what everyone said before the U.S. scraped by Mexico and got stomped like a grape against Italy.
But even if the U.S. team reaches the semis, then what? Italy, Puerto Rico, Japan, South Korea, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic are the other teams still alive in the knockout stage. All of those teams have something in common not shared with the U.S.: They manage to play with intensity and joy.
The Americans can be intense. Earlier in the tournament against Mexico, U.S. catcher Cal Raleigh refused a handshake overture from opponent Randy Arozarena. They are teammates on the Seattle Mariners, but Raleigh reacted as if Arozarena were asking for his computer passwords, replying as if to say: “Don’t bother me, Randy, this is a big game and I’m in the zone!”
It’s possible the only memory anyone will have of the U.S. acting as if they cared about winning the WBC is Raleigh making a miscalculation about the optics of a fist bump.
It’s probably too late to do anything this time, but what can the U.S. do to give itself a chance to win the next WBC?
The best chance is to move the tournament to mid-summer, during a break in MLB’s regular season that doesn’t exist yet and likely won’t soon. But in June or July, all of the best pitchers are in midseason form, and the Americans would have a big talent advantage on the mound. Paul Skenes and Tarik Skubal wouldn’t be limited to a game here or three innings there. They would be able to really pitch, and they would dominate.
That’s the only way for the U.S. to show the world who’s best. Because the Americans are not going to do it the way Japan and the Dominican Republic are doing it now. The Americans don’t have the intensity-joy combination. Their day jobs are just too important to them.
